Sergio Martinez suffers fractured left hand; will miss the remainder of 2013

By Boxing News - 04/29/2013 - Comments

martinez43By Allan Fox: WBC middleweight champion Sergio Martinez (51-2-2, 28 KO’s) really paid the price for his 12 round unanimous decision victory over Britain’s Martin Murray (25-1-1, 11 KO’s) from last Saturday night in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Martinez broke his left hand in the 2nd round of that fight, and re-injured his right knee, which he had torn in his last fight against former WBC middleweight champion Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. last September.

Martinez had surgery on the knee to repair torn cartilage, but he reportedly didn’t rehab it enough because he was having problems with the knee from the 2nd week of training camp for the Murray fight.

In addition to breaking his hand and re-injuring his knee, Martinez also suffered a bad cut over his left eye. All of the injuries combined will make it necessary for Martinez to skip his rematch with Chavez Jr. later on this year and instead sit out until 2014.

According to ESPN, Martinez suffered a “left hand carpal large bone compression fracture.” Recovery from that injury will require 3 ½ months.

The knee injury is the more serious of the injuries because Martinez is looking at another surgery on the knee. Martinez’s promoter Lou Dibella said to ESPN: “He probably needs another surgery to remove scar tissue from the knee.”

Martinez beat the bigger and stronger Murray by the scores of o 115-112, 115-112 and 115-112.

If Martinez did injure his left hand in the 2nd, that would explain why his left hand didn’t look powerful like it had in his previous fights. Martinez looked weak like he’d over-trained or drained down too much in weight.

Since he doesn’t tend to rehydrate all that much for his fights, the most logical reason for his lack of power was the combination of him not being able to bend forward and drive off his injured right knee and not being able to load up on his left hand shots because of the fracture.

It didn’t help Martinez that the canvas was wet from rain and that he was knocked down once and slipped a second a second time. When you have a knee injury it’s not a good thing when you get knocked down or if you slip. Martinez might have aggravated his injured knee even more when that happened.



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