Rios making a mistake if he doesn’t fight Abril again

By Boxing News - 04/19/2012 - Comments

Image: Rios making a mistake if he doesn't fight Abril againBy Dan Ambrose: Last weekend former WBA World lightweight champion Brandon Rios (30-0-1, 22 KO’s) stunk out the joint in winning a controversial 12 round split decision against Richard Abril in a fight where Rios appeared to win little more than three rounds at best.

The judges’ scored it 117-111 for Abril, and 116-112 and 115-113 for Rios. But no one agreed with the judges giving Rios the fight, and a lot of boxing fans think that Rios was given a gift by the two judges that gave him the win. Instead of acknowledging that Abril did enough to beat him, Rios has been defensive about the fight, saying he did enough to get the win and talking about moving ahead with his career in hoped for fights against Juan Manuel Marquez or Mike Alvarado.

The Alvarado fight obviously isn’t high on Rios’ list for his next opponent because of how little he’ll get from that fight and how much risk involved. But I think Rios will be making a wrong decision if he moves on without clearing up the stink of his win over Abril. He really should think long and hard before he moves on because it’s like he’s being pushed forward without passing the Abril test. I would give Rios and ‘F’ for his performance in that fight. He never made any adjustments and looked completely clueless the entire fight.

Rios needs to sit back and take in the fact that he’s getting a lot of criticism for the Abril fight results, and that criticism isn’t going to disappear if he chooses to ignore it and move on as if he won by a mandate. He won by judges who seemed to be looking for entirely different things than the normal boxing public look for. It just looked like Rios got dominated from what I saw of it. If I try to see it through the eyes of the judges that scored it for Rios, I’d have to close my eyes to what Abril was doing and just focus on Rios.

He looked terrible, no power, no boxing skills, no head movement and no clue how to deal with Abril’s superior skills. Yeah, Rios can move on but the criticism of him will likely continue until he faces Abril and proves that he can beat this guy, because he didn’t beat him. It wasn’t even close. Abril dominated him from start to finish and he should have been given a lopsided win over Rios.



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