(Photo Credit: Amanda Westcott/SHOWTIME) By Dan Ambrose: For boxing fans interested in seeing a replay of last Saturday’s featherweight clash between WBA champion Leo Santa Cruz (32-1-1, 18 KOs) and challenger Carl Frampton (23-0, 14 KOs), they can see it tonight on Showtime Extreme at 11:00 p.m. ET/PT. In some circles, they’re calling the Santa Cruz vs. Frampton fight a ‘Fight of the Year’ candidate.
I’m not sure if it comes even close to the much more exciting fight between Orlando Salido and Francisco Vargas last June. That fight was scored a 12 round draw, but it was still a great fight despite the judges failing to give Salido the win after he got the better of Vargas.
The outcome of the Santa Cruz – Frampton fight saw Frampton win a narrow 12 round majority decision victory by the scores of 114-114, 116-112, and 117-111. The 117-111 score appeared to come out of left field, as the score shows a one-sided win by Frampton.
There’s no way that you watch the fight last Saturday and come away with the same conclusion that this judge came to in giving Frampton the victory by a nine rounds to three score. That score is about as bad as the judge that scored the Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Saul “Canelo” Alvarez fight a draw at 114-114. The 117-111 score was senseless, especially given the fact that Santa Cruz not only was the aggressor during the entire fight, but he also threw more, landed more, and threw the harder shots. Normally when a fighter does what Santa Cruz did in the fight, they win. We didn’t see that last Saturday night, and there many people who feel the wrong many had his hand raised at the end of the fight.
There were many boxing fans who felt that the fight could have gone to Santa Cruz or at the very least it could have been scored a draw. Santa Cruz was up against it by him going into the Barclays Center and facing the crowd favorite Frampton. Santa Cruz arguably started the fight four rounds down going out of the gate. Santa Cruz had a big hole climb out of from the very first round.
There was some toe-to-toe action in the second half of the fight last Saturday night between Santa Cruz and Frampton, but for the most part, the action took place mainly in the last three rounds of the fight. It was at that point that Santa Cruz had made up his mind that he was going to cut off the ring on Frampton to force him to fight. Before that, Frampton was content to pot shot and move around the ring to avoid getting hit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHouN4l6r4w&feature=youtu.be
It was hard to watch at times because of there being so little action. In my book, the Santa Cruz vs. Frampton fight wasn’t really all that exciting due to Frampton’s moving and pot shotting from the outside.
Also on tonight’s replay on Showtime will be the light welterweight contender between Mikey Garcia and Elio Rojas in the co-feature bout, and the IBF junior middleweight title eliminator between Tony Harrison and Sergey Rabchenko.