By Jim Dower: WBO cruiserweight champion Marco Huck (38-2-1, 27 KOs) defeated #12 WBO Mirko Larghetti (21-1, 13 KOs) by a 12 round unanimous decision on Saturday night at the Gerry Weber Stadium, Halle, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany.

Huck just narrowly missed knocking the 31-year-old Larghetti out in the 12th round after hurting him and knocking him out after the bell. Huck hurt Larghetti before the bell, but he was knocked out after the bell. Either way, Larghetti lost the fight. The final judges’ scores were 116-112, 116-112 and 118-110.

It was a pretty dirty fight by Huck, who landed a number of very hard elbows to the head and rabbit punches during the fight. The elbows seemed to do a lot of the damage in the later rounds when Huck was landing at least one hard elbow to the head per round. Larghetti kept his cool didn’t retaliate, but he did complain to the referee Jack Reiss about the elbows. He in turn warned Huck but never took any points away for them.

Huck struggled in the first 8 rounds due to the speed advantage of Larghetti. It was difficult to give Huck any of the first 8 rounds because he was too slow and was getting nailed constantly by Larghetti’s fast hands. But Huck definitely took over the fight in the 9th round after hitting Larghetti with a combination of elbows and right hands in the round. Those shots took a lot out of Larghetti, and he was running from the 10th round on.

Huck looked tired himself in the fight, and he was only able to fight hard for brief spurts. Much of the time, he was backing up under the pressure from Larghetti. What’s interesting about this fight is that Larghetti wasn’t known for his punching power coming into the bout, but he was getting the better of Huck with his faster shots until he was hurt in the 9th by a vicious elbow to the head. It’s unclear why Reiss didn’t take points away from Huck for his use of the elbow.

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In the undercard, Denis Boytsov (34-1, 26 KOs) got back to the winning track with a 10 round unanimous decision win over Timur Masafarov (6-2, 5 KOs). The final judges were 95-94, 98-92 and 97-93. The fight looked more like a draw rather than a win for Boytsov, because he was holding for much of the fight, especially the last 5 rounds. Boytsov was very tired from the pressure that Masafarov put on him, and he fell down twice from fatigue in the last half of the fight.

Boytsov is going to need to retool his game, because his performance tonight showed clearly that he doesn’t really have a place in the heavyweight division among the top fighters. He should have been able to easily beat Masafarov, but he didn’t. The fact that Boytsov couldn’t suggests that he’s going to need to be satisfied with being a simple fringe contender.