Postol destroys Matthysse, captures WBC 140lb title

By Boxing News - 10/03/2015 - Comments

Image: Postol destroys Matthysse, captures WBC 140lb title(Photo credit: Tom Hogan/Golden Boy Promotions) By Allan Fox: The 5’6 1/2″ Lucas Matthysse (37-4, 34 KOs) wasn’t able to handle the much taller 5’11” Viktor Postol (28-0, 12 KOs) in losing to the Ukrainian fighter by a 10th round knockout tonight to win the vacat WBA light welterweight title at the StubHub Center in Carson, California. Postol put Matthysse on the canvas to get the knockout. Matthysse looked like he wasn’t that hurt from the punch, but he stayed down anyway. Referee Jack Reiss officially stopped the fight at 2:58 of the 10th round.

You hate to call it a quit job by Matthysse, but that’s basically what he did by going down on one knee and not getting up. He did not look hurt from that punch. I think Matthysse just gave up mentally because he had no answers for what to do to get close enough to throw his punches.

Postol resembled fellow Ukrainian IBF/IBO/WBA/WBO heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko with the way that he would land a shot and then immediately clinch Matthysse to keep him from throwing shots. But Postol went one step further than Klitschko by frequently just grabbing Matthysse to hold without throwing any punches. With the referee Jack Reiss just standing and watching without doing anything to stop Postol from his nonstop holding, Matthysse never stood a chance. He didn’t have Shawn Porter’s training in how to fight out of a clinch by continuing to throw punches nonstop. Matthysse was just giving up and letting Postol get away with his holding without continuing to work.

Matthysse was totally dominated by Postol in the last four rounds of the fight, and he appeared mentally defeated by the time that Postol hit him with an arm punch to put Matthysse down.

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It wasn’t a smart fight by Matthysse. When he was on the outside, he was getting nailed by Postol’s long jabs and combinations. Postol wasn’t throwing with a lot of power, but he was hitting Matthysse none the less. Almost every time that Matthysse would come in punching range, Postol would either grab him in a clinch or move away from him. Matthysse still wasn’t throwing punches when he would work his way in, and he wasn’t fighting his out of the clinches. Early on, Matthysse was hitting Postol while he was being clinched, but he stopped doing that almost entirely in the 2nd half of the fight. This enabled Postol to hold without getting nailed by punches.

Referee Jack Reiss gave Postol two warnings for holding in the 5th round. However, Reiss failed to take points away from Postol in the following rounds despite the fact that he was holding almost as much as he had in the first five rounds. The holding by Postol was a huge fixture of his game, as was his sticking his left arm way out in front of him to keep Matthysse from getting close to him.

I had Matthysse winning five of the first six rounds of the contest with his aggressiveness and harder landing shots. I couldn’t give rounds to Postol because he kept holding and his punches looked incredibly weak compared to Matthysse’s. Postol started increasing his clinching in the 6th round due to Matthysse’s aggressiveness. It was in this round that referee Jack Reiss gave Postol his second warning for holding. The warning stopped Postol from holding for the remainder of the round, but within two rounds, Postol was back to holding as much as he’d done previously. That was unfortunate because the fight became very boring to watch once Reiss stopped policing Postol for his holding tactics. It was just really boring to watch. A good referee would have taken points off one after another to get Postol’s holding under control, but Reiss did nothing and his earlier warning to Postol was forgotten by the 8th round.

Matthysse was really wild with his aggressiveness in the 7th round. He was effective, as he landed some nice punches in that round and forced Postol back to his holding.

The turning point in the fight came in the 8th round, when Postol hit Matthysse with a left hook that caused him to turn around and move backwards against the ropes. It looked like Matthysse lost his composure completely after getting hit with that shot. Postol was like a shark from that point on in the fight. He smelled blood in the water and he really went after Matthysse from then on. Instead of Matthysse fighting bravely, he looked like he mentally crumbled in the 8th, and never did get his aggressiveness back. Matthysse almost completely stopped throwing punches after the 8th.

In the 9th round, Postol clinched Matthysse 10 times to keep him from throwing his shots when he got within punching range. Each time Postol would clinch him, Matthysse would just let him and was acting as meek as a lamb without trying to fight out of the clinch like he had earlier in the fight. Matthysse’s body language had defeat written all over him. He looked like he didn’t want to be there and was welcoming the clinches so that the rounds would stall out.

Postol was able to land a good amount of shots in the 9th, mainly because Matthysse wasn’t trying to throw any punches. Postol had nothing to worry about in terms of incoming from Matthysse.

In the 10th round, Postol had already clinched 12 times in the round at the time that he dropped Matthysse. It looked like Matthysse didn’t want to get up in order to save himself from a further beating. With all the talk that Matthysse had said before the fight about him being a warrior, he didn’t fight like a warrior. If you compare Shawn Porter’s performance against Adrien Broner last June to that of Matthysse’s, it’s like night and day. Porter was a real warrior in that fight against Broner. I think Porter would have an easy time beating a fighter like Postol. Never mind that the two of them are a division apart. Porter would know how to deal with Postol’s height advantage, and he would have broke the Ukrainian down easily.

HBO is interested in Postol fighting WBO light welterweight champion Terence Crawford in a unification fight on their network, but I’d be very surprised if that fight ever happens. Crawford is a better fighter than Matthysse, and he would give Postol a lot of problems with his hand speed, punching power and boxing ability. The height difference between the 5’8″ Crawford and the 5’11” Postol isn’t as pronounced as it was tonight with the 5’6″ Matthysse trying to get close enough to land anything against Postol.



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