By Dave Lahr: Count me in as one of those people who weren’t in the least bit impressed with IBF/WBO heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko’s 9th round stoppage victory over Ruslan Chagaev (25-1-1, 17 KO’s) on Saturday night at the Veltins Arena, in Gelsenkirchen, Germany. This was supposed to be a fight where Wladimir (53-3, 47 KO’s) was looking to come out with more offense to impress his critics and the American cable company HBO, who decided they didn’t want to waste money showing the Chagaev-Wladimir bout.
What we got was pretty much more of the same with Wladimir throwing mainly jabs round after round with only a handful of right hands sprinkled in for good measure. Klitschko fought in his usual safety first style of fighting and only briefly broke out of the mold when he snuck in a right hand late in the 2nd round that dropped Chagaev to the canvas.
Chagaev wasn’t the least bit hurt, but rather just surprised that Wladimir actually threw a hard punch for the first time in the fight. Most fighters would have gone after their opponent after a knockdown. Not Wladimir. He spent the remainder of the round throwing exclusively jabs while leaning backwards as if he was waiting for a counter attack by Chagaev.
I was hoping that Wladimir would start showing some aggression in the 3rd, but he spent almost the entire round throwing nothing but jabs. In fact, I only count one right hand that Wladimir threw in the entire round. I have no idea what was holding him back, because Chagaev was limited to landing only two left hands early in the round and nothing thereafter.
The problem for Chagaev was that he was much too short to land his punches and when he would attempt to come forward and attack, Wladimir either skipped backwards quickly or snatched him in a tight embrace to keep Chagaev from getting his shots off.
This was a fight that Wladimir easily could have looked good in had he decided to let his hands go, but he wasted the opportunity by treating Chagaev as if he were the hardest puncher in the heavyweight division instead of a sloth-like mover with zero hand speed, average power and not much height.
If I was to grade Wladimir’s performance, I would give him just a shade better grade than his last three disappointing fights against Sultan Ibragimov, Tony Thompson and Hasim Rahman. In those fights, Wladimir threw almost entirely jabs until he felt it was safe in the later rounds to start throwing a few right hands. This time, Wladimir would throw two or three right hands per round, which wasn’t a whole better if you ask me.
The fight was incredibly dull in rounds four through eight, with the crowd booing, Wladimir circling the ring, throwing jabs and dashing away each time that Chagaev would try to land anything. It was really bad to watch this fight and I found myself yawning repeatedly from the 6th round on.
It was one of those two cups of coffee type fights. Chagaev landed his best punch of the fight, a left hand after the bell in the 7th. It was a great shot and snapped Wladimir’s head around. I thought maybe Wladimir would go down but he took the shot and walked back to his corner probably thinking revenge.
However, in the 8th round, Wladimir was even less willing to throw right hands and spent the better part of the round throwing nothing but jabs and circling the ring like a track star. God, it was so boring to watch this. In the 9th, Wladimir finally started throwing and landing a decent amount of right hands to the head of Chagaev.
By this time, though, Chagaev looked discouraged and spent from all the jabs he had been getting hit with in the previous eight rounds. He covered up and took the shots and basically threw nothing back. After the round ended, Chagaev’s corner decided that he had taken enough abuse and had the fight stopped. They should have did this much earlier and spared me the ordeal of watching this dull fight.
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