(Photo credit: HBO) By Scott Gilfoid: Martin Murray (29-1-1, 12 KOs) will be a huge underdog tomorrow night when he steps inside the ring to face what most boxing fans acknowledge as the hardest puncher and the best fighter in the middleweight division in Gennady Golovkin (31-0, 28 KOs).
The fight will be taking place in Monaco, and Golovkin will have his WBA Super World middleweight title on the line. Murray, despite having some success in his fights against Sergio Martinez and Felix Sturm, he’s still a huge undercard for Saturday night.
The reason why fans and the betters doubt the 32-year-old Murray isn’t so much due to his lack of success in the Sturm and Martinez fight, but rather because of Murray’s lack of punching power and his slow hand speed.
Murray is both slow and limited in the power department, and that makes it all but impossible for anyone to give him a chance in the fight other than his biggest and most loyal supporters.
“I’ve just got to prove people wrong all over again. I know it’s a massive challenge, but it’s a fight and a challenge I really am looking forward to,” Murray said via the Telegraph.co.uk.
The contrast in personalities between the two fighters has been shown to be totally dramatic in the last two weeks before the fight. In the press conferences, Golovkin has come across as friendly, happy, easy going and boyish without a care in the world.
For his part, Murray has come across as uptight, edgy, unhappy, and even a little surly at times. Murray clearly doesn’t like the idea of him being an underdog, especially an underdog who boxing fans is giving him pretty much zero chance of winning.
Murray seems like it bothers him that fans are discounting him, because in his mind he feels that he should still be an unbeaten fighter and should be the WBC middleweight champion due to his controversial decision loss to Sergio Martinez in 2013 and his draw against Felix Sturm in 2011. While I personally saw Murray losing both of those fights, many of Murray’s fans thought he won the fight.
“It’s going to be a dog fight and I’m going to have to go through some pain,” Murray said. “I’m going to have to go to a place I’ve never been before. But I’m ready, willing and prepared to go to that level and do whatever it takes to win that fight. It will be my versatility that gets me through this fight.”
Well, if Murray does decide to turn the fight into a “dog fight” as he says he’ll be doing, then I hope he plans on bringing some power with him for this fight, because he’s going to need a lot more power than he showed in his last fight against Domenico Spada in 2014, and in his fights against Martinez and Sturm.
That version of Murray will get blown out of the water by the harder hitting Golovkin.
Overall, I think Murray is going to come up short in this fight and wind up getting dominated in losing by a knockout defeat.
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