By Scott Gilfoid: After going life and death for 11 rounds last night with a very limited, small and old cruiserweight Valery Brudov (41-5, 28 KO’s), Liverpool’s Tony Bellew (21-2-1, 13 KO’s) was able to finally get a stoppage in the 12th round when he caught Brudov with a short left hook to the head that flattened him for the 10 count at the Echo Arena in Liverpool.
While it may seem painfully obvious to most fans that Bellew doesn’t have what it takes to be a major player in the cruiserweight division after his performance against a mediocre fighter like Brudov, Bellew still bragged about his performance afterwards as if he accomplished his goal or trying to impress.
“I’m happy,” Bellew said to Sky Sports. “Believe me, at this weight I can punch. I took him clean off his feet a couple of times, especially the second. I thought ‘that is good night now’, and he got up. I thought ‘welcome to the cruiserweight division I’m happy I’ve done it late on too, as it shows I carry power.”
I think someone needs to sit Bellew down and show him video of what a good cruiserweight in Ola Afolabi did to Brudov two years ago in effortlessly stopping him in the 5th round. There was no drama in the Brudov-Afolabi fight. It was simply a case of Afolabi bludgeoning Brudov for four rounds before halting him in the 5th. But in the case of Bellew, he really had to struggle against Brudov last night. I mean, Brudov had Bellew out on his feet in the 7th round, and if not for the referee giving Bellew almost a minute to recover from a belt line shot that Bellew said was low, we’d have seen Brudov score a knockout.
A lot of referees wouldn’t have gone for Bellew turning his back on Brudov after getting hit in the belt line. These referees would have commanded Bellew to immediately resume fighting and if he didn’t, then they would have stopped the fight and given Brudov a KO. To me, I saw that as a real blow it call by the referee Phil Edwards by not having Bellew continue to fight. You have to look at it in the context of what had happened. Bellew was out on his feet and trying to hold on. He gets hit with a belt line shot, and he immediately starts with the look of pain. We saw Zab Judah do that against Amir Khan in 2011, and the referee didn’t buy it and counted Judah out when he failed to get back up.
This referee should have done the same thing because when you have a hurt fighter doing something like that after getting hit on the belt line, it’s the equivament of a hurt fighter spitting out their mouthpiece after getting hurt in order to buy time to recover. It worked for Bellew last night, but I think the referee really blew it and took a knockout away from Brudov in letting Bellew get away with that. That was clearly a belt line shot.
I don’t expect Bellew to be matched up against a good opponent for his next fight. His promoter Eddie Hearn says he wants to get him one more fight before matching him against one of the cruiserweight champions. Sure, Hearn can do that, but Bellew is going to be out of his element when he’s put in with one of the cruiserweight champions. Hearn can have Bellew skip the prerequisite courses and throw him into the equivalent of calculus, but he’s going to be under-equipped in a major way with him barely grasping fractions and decimals in terms of experience.
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