By Eric Thomas: Count me in as one of the many people who don’t want to see WBO light welterweight champion Timothy Bradley fight Nate Campbell again. The fight ended up in controversy with Campbell sustaining a bad cut over his left eye from a head butt in the 3rd round last Saturday night. However, the bout was almost entirely controlled by the younger 25-year-old Bradley who got the better of Campbell during pretty much every minute of action of the fight.
Campbell has an argument about the referee David Mendoza blowing the call by saying that the cut was caused by a punch rather than a head butt that much is clear. But, that still doesn’t take away the fact that Bradley was dominating the fight and making Campbell look like an old fighter in the process.
Though the fight was still in the early stages, it looked as if Bradley wasn’t about to tire out any time soon and would have likely continued on course to win a unanimous decision. Campbell was missing a lot of punches and looking really slow in there. He said afterwards that he was in the process of walking Bradley down and would have gotten to him in the later rounds.
I don’t believe that, though. Campbell was throwing and missing with his shots, and looked out of his league in the fight. Campbell can punch good, but he’s not the kind of huge puncher that would be able to change the course of a fight against a fighter like Bradley who has a pretty good chin. I think Campbell could certainly have gotten to Bradley if he was able to land enough punches, but the problem with that is Campbell wasn’t landing often enough to cause Bradley any problems in the fight.
A rematch between these two fighters will likely end up the same way with one of the two getting cut from another head butt. Campbell and Bradley were clashing heads from the first round and continued to bang heads until the end of the fight in the 3rd. It’s just a problem with their style of fighting in which both of them come forward with their heads down.
It would probably take a miracle for the two fighters to go it without another cut occurring at some point in the fight. Because of that, I think Bradley needs to move on and find someone else. I’m all for having Campbell’s loss erased by having the verdict changed to a no decision. But I think Bradley needs to move on in another direction. He could go after a unification match against Amir Khan or Devon Alexander.
That would be interesting. I doubt that Khan would go for it, though, but I think Alexander would be game. Short of that, Bradley should look at defending his title against a popular slugger like Marcos Maidana. That would be a fight that would sure to entertain and get the cable networks and boxing fans interested.
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