By Scott Gilfoid: As you would guess, EBU super bantamweight champion Carl Frampton (17-0, 12 KO’s) stopped #4 IBF Jeremy Parodi (35-2-1, 9 KO’s) in the 6th round on Saturday night at the Odyssey Arena, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom. Frampton, 26, knocked Parodi down with a left to the body in the 6th.
Parodi didn’t bother getting up, and I don’t blame him for not trying. I mean, he was like a punching bag in there and had no chance of winning due to his complete lack of power.
Why the International Boxing Federation had Parodi ranked #4 by their organization is beyond me because he looked more like a bottom #44 fighter than an actual #4. Congradulations for the good match-making by Team Frampton for picking this guy out of the pack instead of taking on talents like Leo Santa Cruz and Guillermo Rigondeaux.
After the fight Barry McGuigan, the adviser for Frampton, said that they’ll be looking to match Frampton against the winner of the December 21st fight between IBF super bantamweight champion Kiko Martinez and Jeffrey Mathebula. In other words, Frampton is being positioned against arguably the weakest of the super bantamweight champions rather than the strongest. I’d like to have seen McGuigan say that he wanted to match Frampton against WBC champion Santa Cruz or the WBA/WBO champion Rigondeaux, but then again those two guys are clearly at a higher level than Frampton and it probably wouldn’t be much of a fight.
As for tonight’s fight, if you want to call it that, Frampton landed at will against the light-hitting Parodi with power shots. Parodi was unable to do anything other than throw weak jabs one after another. Most of the time, Parodi would short-arm the jabs with them missing. I got the impression after a while that Parodi was mostly using his jabs to fend Frampton off without having any real intention of hitting him because he seemed like he didn’t want to get close enough to throw his jabs with meaning for fear he’d get hit. Parodi might as well have gone for broke because he was getting nailed something fierce by Frampton the entire fight and it was kind of off putting to see him take such a one-way pounding.
By the 4th round, Parodi had suffered a cut over his left eye and he was looking discouraged and bloody. Frampton nailed him with a jab early in the round that knocked him backwards a few steps. Thinking he had him hurt, Frampton teed off on Parodi for the remainder of the round and had him looking a little unsteady at one point after nailing him with a right hook that curved around to the back of his head.
The fight should have been stopped after the 4th because Parodi was simply too weak to be competitive and he was just taking terrible punishment.
When Parodi did eventually go down with a body shot in the 6th, I think he had enough and wasn’t going to bother getting back up because he had to know at that point that he had zero chances of winning the fight.
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