By William Mackay: Fighting for the first time in over a year, undefeated middleweight contender Darren Barker (23-0, 14 KO’s) defeated fringe contender Domenico Spada (32-4, 16 KO’s) by a 12 round unanimous decision to capture the vacant European Boxing Union (EBU) middleweight title on Saturday night at the Olympia in London, England.

The final judges’ scores were 115-113, 116-113 and 116-113. Barker looked relatively good in the first three-fourths of the fight but then ran out of gas like he did in his last fight a year ago and took a lot of punishment from the slow but game Spada. Barker did a lot of things that made it easy on Spada by standing in front of him and just covering up in the last part of the fight. I saw Barker winning the fight but not by a lot. He was too easy to hit and showed no defense other than when he was moving around the ring. It wasn’t comforting that Barker ran out of gas at the end. You could say this was because of the ring rust on him from a year out of the ring but Barker looked the same way in his last fight last year April against Affif Belghecham. This suggests that Barker has problems related to his stamina that other fighters will capitalize on unless he can fix it.

Barker also had a nasty habit of leading with uppercuts and telegraphing the shots. Barker was very easy to predict in what he was about to do, but Spada was too limited to do much about it most of the fight. In winning the fight, Barker recaptures the EBU title, which he had to give up last year due to an injury.

Barker looked decent but nowhere near as good as guys like Sergio Martinez and Dimitry Pirog. Those two are a level above what Barker showed tonight.