The two fighters then came together for a long stare down, and it looked like Hatton was trying to intimidate the cool and calm Senchenko, who showed little emotion the entire time. Senchenko is a professional and he’s not bothered by intimidation tactics. He’s well beyond those types of tricks.
Hatton looked small and kind of dried out. No doubt from all the weight that he had taken off just to get down to the 147 lb limit. Hatton had to take off 70+ pounds just to make weight. It’s hard to fathom someone trimming off over 70 pounds to fight at 147. That’s like Wladimir Klitschko trimming down from 360 lbs to fight at 247 lbs.
I kind of doubt that Wladimir would be effective after taking that kind of weight off unless he was fighting someone really outclassed. In Hatton’s case he’ll probably still win because Senchenko was an untested welterweight for his entire career until facing Paulie Malignaggi recently and getting stopped in the 9th round in April. If Malignaggi is able to beat Senchenko then I imagine even this version of Hatton will be able to do it too, provided that he can take some hard head shots from Senchenko along the way.
There’s no question that Senchenko is going to be teeing off on Hatton in the early going to see if he can duplicate what Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather Jr. did in stopping him. If there’s a problem with Hatton taking head shots we’re going to find out early because Senchenko is going to be giving everything he’s got in landing to the head.
Look for Hatton to take the fight to the inside almost immediately and focus on a combination of grappling and throwing body shots in close. I just hope we don’t see the long stretches of prolonged wrestling from Hatton that we saw in his win over Kostya Tszyu back in 2005, because that fight really needed a referee to break the constant wrestling to make it more actual fight.
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