Buglioni: I’ll be back!

By Scott Gilfoid: After losing a bitterly disappointing 12 round unanimous decision loss to WBA “regular” super middleweight champion Fedor Chudinov (14-0, 10 KOs) last Saturday night in a mostly one-sided contest at the SSE Wembley Arena in London, UK, #4 WBA Frank Buglioni (17-2-1, 13 KOs) is vowing that he’ll come back from the loss.

Buglioni fought his heart out last night, but he just didn’t have the right tactics to get the job done. You can second guess a lot of the things that the 26-year-old Buglioni did in the fight, such as the way he only fought hard in the last 15 to 20 seconds of many of the rounds, or how he used up valuable energy by moving constantly. But perhaps if Buglioni had fought hard for the three minutes of every round and not ran around the ring for 2 ½ minutes of each round, he might have been knocked out.

Buglioni obviously knows himself and what he’s capable of doing better than the boxing fans, but for me it looked like Buglioni fought a rather stupid fight. It’s hard to imagine a good trainer telling a tall fighter like Buglioni to run for three-fourths of every round, and only fight hard for the last 20 seconds. I don’t think a good trainer would want anything to do with a silly game plan like that.

Chudinov won the fight by the scores of 120-106, 118-108 and 117-109. I think the first score of 120-106 accurately described what actually took place in the fight.

“I’ll be back from this, it’s still early and raw, but I’ll go back to the drawing board and start again,” Buglioni said. “His punches were very correct and he had a good defence, he gets my respect, he’s a very good fighter.”

The high point of the fight for Buglioni was him hurting Chudinov in the last 20 seconds of the 6th round when he unloaded on the Russian with a fire storm of punches that had him badly hurt. But then Buglioni had a mental error when he hit Chudinov with a hard right hand after the bell had ended in the round. The punch knocked Chudinov down on his backside on the canvas.

Referee Terry O’Connor than took two points off from Buglioni for the shot. But more importantly, he gave Chudinov a lot of time to recover from the punches he’d absorbed by taking valuable time while deducting the points.

Had Buglioni not landed that shot after the bell, Chudinov would have had less time to recover from the series of blows that Buglioni had landed in the 6th, and he might have been able to knock him out at the start of the 7th. We’ll never know because Buglioni blew it by hammering the Russian fighter with a shot after the bell.

When Buglioni says he’ll be back, I’m not too sure what he means by that. If he means he’ll be back fighting for a world title, I don’t think that will be happening. I think the Chudinov fight was his only shot. I don’t think Buglioni is good enough to work his way to another world title unless the sanctioning bodies ranks him highly from fodder victories. But if Buglioni fights someone good, then I don’t see him winning.

Buglioni can fight Lee Markham or Sergey Khomitsky again, but I don’t think he’d do any better against those guys that he did the first time around. Buglioni fades badly in his fights and he doesn’t fight the full three minutes of every round. Markham and Khomitsky have better engines than Buglioni, and they’d like wear him down in the second half of their fights the seond time around to get either a knockout or a decision win.

If Buglioni couldn’t even beat the 168lb champion that many boxing fans see as the weak link among the super middleweight champions, then that’s pretty much it for Buglioni. He won’t stand a chance against Badou Jack, James DeGale or Arthur Abraham.

“I had a fantastic opportunity for the world title and I gave it my best. I stuck it with one of the world’s top super-middleweights, but on the night he was the better man,” said Buglioni.

Buglioni tried his best, but it wasn’t good enough. I don’t know what he can do to improve other than dump his trainer and find someone that will tell him that he can’t afford to be fighting hard in brief spurts the way he did last Saturday night.

Buglioni needs a trainer that will keep him from running around all over creation in his fights. If the man can’t stay in the pocket when he fights then I think he needs to find another line of work.