By Dan Ambrose: If you want to pinpoint the real reason for WBA junior middleweight champion Austin Trout’s 12 round decision loss to WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez last night you only have to point to the World Boxing Council’s decision to have open scoring used for their fight at the Alamodome in San Antonio, Texas.
With one judge giving Canelo most of the rounds in the 4 rounds and the other two having Canelo ahead in that stage of the fight as well as in the 8th, it forced Trout to fight a much more risky fight that made him desperate. You’ve got a judge scoring the 80-71 after eight rounds, which is incredibly sad, and the other two giving Canelo a lead.
That basically gave Canelo every advantage that he needed to win. I still think he lost rounds 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12, but having the crazy judges’ scores read to Trout twice in the fight, in the 4th and the 8th, made it a much different.
I think open scoring is a terrible idea because it gives the fighter that has a lead a huge advantage because his opponent is forced to fight in a desperate manner and that lets the winning fighter fight defensively, and that’s what Canelo did. It also gave Canelo a lot of opportunities to land his big power shots because Trout was forced to fight with desperation.
It’s sad that Trout had to agree to all of this just to get the fight with Canelo because I’m sure if he said no to the idea of opening scoring, Canelo and Golden Boy would have moved on and selected Alfredo Angulo for Canelo to fight instead in Texas. The WBC voted in favor of open scoring for their WBC sanctioning fights, so it’s situation where you’re stuck.
I think it’s really bad because when you’ve got judges that are scoring fight in such a way that one fighter is way behind, it telegraphs what’s going to happen in the fight. The guy that’s winning, in this case Canelo, can play defense because he’s got some referee scoring the fight 80-71. It’s a joke and so sad for boxing for Trout.
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