By Scott Gilfoid: Bob Shannon, the trainer for Ricky Hatton, said that Hatton kind of lost it a little after getting hit with a big right hand shot from former WBA World welterweight champion Vyacheslav Senchenko (33-1, 22 KO’s) in the 4th round. From there on, Hatton was only looking to try and get back at Senchenko and wasn’t following the game plan that Shannon wanted Hatton to follow, which was to use head movement and box his way in close instead of just barreling forward with little thought of defense.

Shannon said to thesun.co.uk “Ricky was doing really well until he was caught by a big right in the fourth round. He was annoyed with himself and couldn’t shrug it off…I lost control of him. His attitude was ‘you hurt me, I’ll hurt you back.'”

How sad. So it looks like Hatton got hit and completely lost his senses and starting fighting in a more primitive manner instead of from the things that he’d learned through the years. In his prime, Hatton was pretty decent and using head movement.

If you look at some of Hatton’s best fights, he used feints and was able to work his way in close to land his big shots. But more or less from the Floyd Mayweather fight on, Hatton became more of a straight brawler and wasn’t doing the things that he had done earlier.

Hatton might have been under the impression that he could bulldoze Senchenko after watching Paulie Malignaggi have such an easy time beating him in April of this year. Malignaggi did it with little more than a jab, and he didn’t get that much in return. However, Hatton was trying to beat Senchenko without a jab, and was just walking straight into Senchenko’s jabs and power shots instead of staying at a distance to soften him up with jabs like Malignaggi had done.

In hindsight, Hatton should have boxed Senchenko, and he should have kept his cool when he started getting hit hard in the 4th. Senchenko has excellent power and he’s a legitimate welterweight, unlike Hatton. Trying to just blow away Senchenko was the wrong strategy for Hatton, as he probably knows by now. It’s too bad he didn’t fight smart because it was a winnable fight for him.