By Scott Gilfoid: 25-year-old British lightweight champion Anthony Crolla (23-2, 9 KO’s) did what everyone thought he would do by easily beating 32-year-old Willie Limond (34-4, 8 KO’s) by a one-sided 12 round unanimous decision on Friday night at the Ravenscraig Sports Centre, Motherwell, Scotland.
The final judges’ scores were 120-108, 120-108 and 120-108. It was pretty one-sided from start to finish and not a good fight to watch unless you had a good stiff cup of coffee to keep you energized for this one. Limond had no power or hand speed and couldn’t much even when he was landing. The same goes for Crolla – no power and very little hand speed. Crolla did have a good work rate and that alone was the difference in this awful to watch fight.
The lights went out during the 7th round, leaving the ring in total darkness. Unfortunately, that was the high point of the night.
As far as the fight action goes, every round was almost exactly the same with Limond aiming most of his slow, weak punches at the midsection of Crolla. It was weird the way his wrists would bend when he would land. Not sure what was up with that, but the lack of power was so painfully obvious and disappointing. Crolla wasn’t much better watch.
When he would land there just wasn’t any power to speak of. Crolla did what he had to do by landing constantly but he was shooting with blanks against a guy that wasn’t at his level. I wonder why a better opponent couldn’t have been found, but when you’re domestic level, I guess this is what you get.
Crolla is someone that was talked about as a future world class fighter. However, I couldn’t see anything from this performance or from his past fight’s performance against Juan Montiel (5-4) that would suggest that Crolla can be anything more than a domestic level fighter. The power and speed just isn’t there and I think the lack for those qualities will keep Crolla down in the domestic ranks his entire career.
After the fight, there was talk of a future bout between Crolla and WBO lightweight interim champion Ricky Burns. Let me be the first to say that I think that’s a terrible idea. While I’m not very impressed with Burns, I think he’s a lot better fighter than Crolla now and in the future. Burns is at a different level, and that’s not saying much.
I hope for Crolla’s sake he doesn’t face any world class opposition any time soon because I think he’ll have major problems when/if that happens. Even against a bottom feeder world class fighter, I see Crolla getting dominated and possibly knocked out. He’s good where he is right now and my advice is for him to milk that British title for as long as possible.
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