By Jim Dower: 35-year-old Juergen Braehmer (42-2, 31 KO’s) defeated #1 WBA Marcus Oliveira (25-1-1, 20 KO’s) by a 12 round unanimous decision on Saturday night to capture the vacant WBA light heavyweight title at the Jahnsportforum, Neubrandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany.

The final judges scores were 115-112, 117-110 and 117-110. Oliveira hurt Braehmer with a right hand in the 12th round, and was nailing him with shots for much of the round while Braehmer held on to ride out the round.

The southpaw Braehmer dominated the action in using his jab and straight left hands to control the action over Oliveira. It was pretty one-sided for the most part. In the 10th, Braehmer dropped Oliveira with a left hand to the groin. It was clearly a low blow but the referee either missed it or simply thought it was close enough to the belt line for it to be a legal shot.

Now that Braehmer has the title it’s going to be interesting to see if he attempts to fight the other 175 lb. champions Adonis Stevenson or Sergey Kovalev to unify the belts or if he’ll choose to milk his title like he did the last time when he was the WBO champion from 2009-2011. Braehmer played it incredibly safe during two years as the champion, and finally was stripped of his title when he failed to fight the only halfway decent opponent presented to him in Nathan Cleverly. Based on how Braehmer was matched before, I don’t think he’ll get anywhere near the likes of Stevenson or Kovalev, ever.

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#1 IBF Kubrat Pulev (19-0, 10 KO’s) survived a 4th round knockdown to come on and defeat Joey Abell (29-7, 28 KO’s) by a 4th round stoppage.

The 6’4 1/2″ Pulev was dropped by a hard right hand from Abell in the 4th. However, Pulev immediately came back to knock Abell down down with a hard body shot. Pulev then knocked Abell down one more time before the round ended. Abell chose not to come out for the 5th round.

Pulev getting knocked down by a fighter like Abell isn’t a good sign for Pulev in having any chance at all against IBF/IBO/WBA/WBO heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko, who Pulev will be facing in 2014. Pulev’s lack of power is going to be a real problem for him in this fight, and Wladimir is a much better puncher than Abell. But Pulev will at least get a good payday even in losing the fight so it’s not entirely a bad thing for him.

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Other results on the card:

Tyron Zeuge TKO 5 Alessio Furlan
Dominik Britsch SD 8 Soufiene Ouerghi
Enrico Koelling UD 8 Tomas Adamek