By Manuel Perez: Undefeated light middleweight John Duddy (26-0, 17 KOs) defeated journeyman Matt Vanda (39-9, 22 KOs) by a 10-round unanimous decision tonight at Madison Square Garden, in New York, New York. The final judges’ scores were 99-91, 99-91 and 97-93. Duddy, 29, looked good for the most part, dominating the limited Vanda and winning most of the rounds. However, he was pressured hard in the 10th round, and took a lot of heavy shots from Vanda, seeming to stun Duddy momentarily. Fortunately for Duddy, he was able to last out the round without going down but it left a bad stain on what was a lopsided victory for the Irish Duddy.
Duddy used his jab as his main weapon for most of the fight, keeping in the face of the slower Vanda and not letting him get many chances to land his own shots. Duddy somehow resisted his usual tendency to slug it out with his opponents and stayed in the boxing mode for the most part.
He added a nice right hand from time to time, but much less so than he usually does in his fights. Vanda looked essentially overmatched and out of his class with Duddy, at least as far as skills go. Duddy landed well with short power shots, delivering punches in fast sessions.
However, his punches seemed to lack any real power and had no effect on Vanda. In contrast to how Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. looked in the 2nd fight with Vanda, Duddy seemed less impressive than Chavez and noticeably weaker than the Mexican warrior. With Duddy throwing mostly weak shots, Vanda keep pressuring him and now showing him any respect whatsoever.
Duddy controlled the action in rounds one through six, keeping busy with his jab and continuing to throw weak combinations. Vanda had his moments in each round, cornering the slow-footed Duddy and landing some nice shots.
As weak as a puncher that Vanda was, he was clearly the harder puncher in the fight, which was alarming given Duddy’s high ranking in both the light middleweight and middleweight divisions. At this point in the fight, I couldn’t see how or why Duddy was ranked as high as he is because he looked weak, beatable and slow. He looked more like a 2nd tier fighter than a top 15 fighter during the early stages of the fight.
Unfortunately, he looked just as mediocre in rounds six through nine, fighting defensively and reminding me a lot of Felix Sturm, the IBF middleweight champion, noted for his safety first style of fighting. The crowd, naturally, hated Duddy’s new, less exciting, style of fighting and booed him loudly.
Vanda continued to have his brief moments in rounds seven through nine, landing cleanly at times with power punches. The problem for Vanda was that his hand speed was terrible, which prevented him from landing more often than he would have if he was a couple of shades faster.
His lack of size was a problem, too, as he was the smaller fighter and didn’t have enough size to overpower Duddy the way that many of the top 15 middleweights would likely do if they could get their hands on Duddy.
In the 10th, Vanda came out on fire, blasting a shocked looking Duddy, and pummeling him around the ring in an embarrassing fashion. What was particularly bad was that Vanda isn’t even ranked in the top 15, yet he was making Duddy look like a punching dummy in the round and showing that Duddy isn’t ready for a fight with Kelly Pavlik or any other champion in the middleweight or light middleweight division.
Based on this fight, I see Duddy as am poor choice of an opponent for Pavlik and I hope that Kelly doesn’t waste time fighting him. If Duddy wants to fight someone, let him fight Chavez Jr. and prove that he’s good enough to beat him. I doubt that he would.
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