By Erik Schmidt: In a highly controversial bout, undefeated middleweight contender Sebastian Zbik (27-0, 10 KO’s) earned a close 12-round unanimous decision over top rated WBC middleweight contender Italian Domenico Spada (29-2, 14 KO’s) on Saturday night for the interim World Boxing Council middleweight title at the Nuerburgring race track, in Nuerburg, Germany.
Spada, 28, fought his heart out in the 12 round bout, outworking the 27-year-old Zbik in virtually ever round and landing many more shots than Zbik in the fight. Spada was like a wind up punching machine, throwing countless punches in every round and seeing to never get tired. He kept Zbik on the defense by throwing tons of punches and giving Zbik few chances to land any shots in the fight, even in the later rounds.
Zbik had the better jab and the slightly harder punches, but he wasn’t able to come close to matching the work rate of Spada and was hit many more times than Spada in the fight. The judges ended up scoring it 115-114, 115-114 and 115-114 for Zbik.
I’m not sure which fight they were watching, however, because I had Spada winning by a landslide of at least 11 of 12 rounds of the fight. With Spada out-landing Zbik approximately 20 punches to 1 in every round, I just couldn’t see how Zbik was able to win more than one round. He punched a little harder than Spada, I readily admit, but he wasn’t throwing nearly enough punches to win so many rounds.
Spada stayed on top of Zbik in every second of the fight, giving him few chances to land his shots. Each time Zbik would try to get some space between him and Spada, the Italian fighter would quickly close the gap and charge forward to get back in close where Zbik could do little.
In the first three rounds, Zbik made the mistake of grabbing Spada’s arms and head, and would get pummeled by Spada’s free arm with one shot after another. In all three rounds, Zbik was only able to land little more than 10 punches per round, whereas Spada was throwing close to 80 by my counts.
It was terribly one-sided at this time and impossible to score any of these rounds for Zbik. Nothing changed in round four through seven, as Spada continued to throw punches at an enormous rate. Zbik continued to throw on average only 10 punches in each of these rounds while getting hit with countless shots from Spada.
It was really bad, almost like Zbik was an over grown punching bag and just taking shots. Unless you had your eyes closed, none of the rounds could have been scored for Zbik at this point. From here on out, he needed a knockout to win the fight or so you would believe if you were watching the fight with a level head.
In rounds eight and nine, Spada continued with his one-sided domination of Zbik, raining shots down on him without stop and making it look quite easy.
By this point in the fight, Zbik began to clinch after every punch, trying to slow Spada’s enormous work rate to a crawl by grabbing him any chance he could get. It worked fairly well, because Zbik was finally able to win a round by grabbing Spada after every shot in the 10th and not letting him retaliate.
The referee should have considered penalizing Zbik at some point because the holding was out of control in the last three rounds and marred what was an interesting one-sided fight. After appearing to lose the 10th, Spada came back strong in the 11th and 12th rounds, landing many more shots compared to Zbik despite having the German fighter draped all over him for much of the time.
In between being grabbed, Spada was able to land far more shots than Zbik and appeared to easily win the last three rounds. It wasn’t even close. For example, in the 12th round Spada out-landed Zbik by a 11-3 margin, even with Zbik clinching him without stop.