By Scott Gilfoid: Kell Brook’s trainer Dominic Ingle wasn’t ready to give Errol Spence Jr. too much credit last Saturday night after he dispatched his fighter in the 11th round in that fight on Sky box PPV. Ingle said Brook’s eye injury was the main cause for Kell to lose to Spence. Ingle says the eye injury occurred in the 6th and 7th round. From that point, Spence took over the fight.
Ingle’s view of the fight seems to run counter to what a lot of boxing fans felt about the contest through the first 10 rounds. Many of them thought the fight was swung on Spence’s body attack, which wore Brook down starting in the 7th round. The eye injury that Brook suffered appeared to take place in the 8th round. The fight had already started to change hands starting in the 5th. That’s when Boxing News 24 saw Spence take control over the fight. Brook was doing fine in the fine, but the accumulation of body shots eventually wore him down.
Ingle says Spence wasn’t the toughest fight for Brook at 147. He says the Shawn Porter fight was tougher than the Spence fight. Brook beat Porter by a controversial 12 round majority decision three years ago in 2014. Brook was forced to clinch all night long to keep Porter from throwing punches. Unlike Spence, Porter didn’t try and fight his way through the constant clinching from Brook. He just gave up each time Brook would hold him, and he’d wait for the referee to step in and break them apart.
Spence had the advantage in seeing the Brook-Porter fight ahead of time so he could prepare for the excessive clinching that he might use. Even in training hard to negate Brook’s frequent holding, Spence still ended up being clinched around 7 to 8 times per round in the first 5 rounds. Spence had to work hard to get his shots off before Brook would grab him in a clinch.
”He’s not the best fighter in the world,” said Ingle about Spence. ”He’s not Floyd Mayweather. I think it was a harder fight Kell vs. Shawn Porter. I think Shawn Porter was a much harder fight,”said Ingle.
Oh my, Ingle does sound a tad bit bitter about Brook’s loss to Spence, doesn’t he? It sure would be nice if Brook and Ingle would give the talented Spence some credit for having won the fight. It’s always sad when a fighter and his trainer can’t take the high road and admit when they’ve been beaten by the better man. Ingle can’t say that Porter was the harder fight for Brook when he lost the fight. It just tells me that Porter wasn’t thinking on his feet the way that Spence was in fighting through the excessive clinching that Brook was doing in the fight.
Porter couldn’t have been the harder fight for Brook if he was just surrendering to the nonstop clinching. I think it’s obvious that Spence was the tougher fight for Brook. The results speak for themselves. Spence didn’t surrender like a lamb each time Brook grabbed him in a bear-hug to stall out the fight. Spence made it a point to hit Brook to the body each time he would hold. If you notice, Brook didn’t do much holding by the 6th round. You know why, don’t you? It’s because Spence had worked Brook’s body to the point where he was too weak to hold. He’d been worn down by body shots from all the clinching he was doing. That’s my analysis. Brook couldn’t take the body shots that came with his clinching, so he stopped clinching.
“In the first 6 rounds, I thought Kell was in front of by 3 or 4 rounds,” said Brook’s trainer Dominic Ingle to Fighthype.com. “I think 6 or 7, he got the eye injury. The fight started to swing in Spence’s favor at that point. I can only imagine what’s going through Kell’s head. ‘Have we got Golovkin again, but it’s the other eye this time. It is fractured. That swung it in Spence’s favor and gave him an advantage. Kell was having difficulty focusing on Spence. There was a time where he was catching him with shots and could turn the fight around, but Errol stuck to his guns. He’s younger, he’s a bit fresher and he came out victorious. Kell said the body shots were never troubling him. We do a bit of body sparring. We’re conditioned for it. There was never a point where Kell said, ‘The body shots were affecting me.’ It was more the shots to the eye. The eye swung the fight. I believe making the weight all these years has taken the edge off him, and we’re probably going to have to talk about what he’s going to do,” said Ingle.
It sounds like Ingle has two reasons why Brook lost the fight:
– Reason No.1 why Brook lost: His eye injury that Ingle believes occurred in the 6th or 7th.
– Reason No.2 why Brook lost: Making weight has taken the edge off of Kell.
Well, I sense sour grapes with Ingle. His man lost to Spence and he’s just going to have live with it. Ingle can blame it on the weight or his eye until he’s blue in the face, but the fact of the matter is, Brook lost. Ingle can say that the Shawn Porter fight was the tougher one for Brook than the Spence fight, but the basic facts suggest otherwise. Spence best Brook. Porter lost to him. It may have been a controversial decision in the minds of a lot of boxing fans, and Brook might have gotten lucky in having a referee that has hands off approach to nonstop clinching one fighter.
Brook still won the fight. Ingle can call the Porter fight the tougher one for Brook, but I don’t think the boxing public will agree with him. Just the sight of Brook taking a knee twice against Spence in rounds 10 and 11 tell you all you need to know about which of the two fights was the tougher one for Brook. I don’t remember Brook taking a knee twice against Porter. Maybe I missed that part of the fight.
“Kell almost had it,” said Amir Khan to Dontae’s Boxing Nation in giving his 2 cents on the Brook-Spence fight. “I think Keith Thurman fight in a unification [is what Spence needs next]. Errol is up there as one of the top at 147 fighters. I’m going to be back in the ring come November. AK’s back,” said Khan.
How in the world could Kell have “almost had it,” like Khan says against Spence, when he was getting pummeled from rounds 5 until the bitter end in the 11th? Brook would have “almost had it” if the fight was only 4 rounds long. Brook definitely would have “had it” if he had signed for a 4-rounder against Spence instead of a 12 round fight. Brook never had the fight in the bag. It was still an undecided fight when Brook was briefly ahead. After 10 rounds, Spence was ahead on all three of the judges’ scorecards by the scores 97-92, 95-94 and 96-93. The judge that had the fight scored close at 95-94 was the British judge Dave Parris. Boxing News 24 scored the fight 97-92.
“Unfortunately for Kell Brook, he was in with a young, fresh guy who can punch,” said Carl Froch to IFL TV. “When you can punch like that, you can do damage. It’s his eye socket again. It’s his other eye socket. There appears to be a bit of a problem. It’s such a bad injury – double vision, quad-triple vision. To come back after the knockdown, it showed real bravery, real courage again like against Gennady Golovkin. If he carried on after round 11, he might have done something. I don’t think he quit. He went down voluntarily on his knee. He looked at the ref. He didn’t know quite where he was. He stood up,” said Froch.
So, Froch doesn’t think Brook quit. That’s interesting because I don’t know what else you can call it. When you take a knee in the 11th round and stays down for the full 10 round, how is that not quitting? Heck, Brook wasn’t even hit at the time that he took the knee. If you look at the final sequence in the 11th, you see Brook scurrying away from Spence and then taking a knee when he stated closing the distance to get at him. To me, it sure looked like Brook quit on one knee. We more or less saw the same thing from Brook in the 10th round when he dropped to a knee to escape punishment from Spence.
As far as Froch saying that Brook could have done something if he’d made it through round 11 by coming on in round 12, I seriously doubt it. That’s fantasy stuff from Froch. It was painfully obvious that Brook was fighting on fumes from the 8th round on. Brook wasn’t going to be able to turn things around in the 12th round against Spence.
There was nothing magical about the 12th round. Even if Brook had made it to the 12th, he was going to take a beating just like he had in rounds 9, 10 and 11. Brook was done by the 11th. Brook could have come out for the 12th, but he was going to take a royal pounding if he’d made it that far. It’s too bad Froch can’t tell it like it is, because it was so clear that Brook was done by the 11th. There was no coming back for Brook. He was beyond the point of no return.
“It was just a shame to see it end like that. He was the one that had the injury,” said Froch. “He was the one after the Golovkin fight he was told he could go blind if he’s not careful. You have to respect his decision to go down. He came up against a great fighter in Errol Spence. He’s cool and calm,” said Froch.
I don’t think the injury changed the outcome in the Brook-Spence fight. I believe that Brook was destined to be knocked out in the 10th or 11th rounds by Spence. If Brook hadn’t taken a knee and hadn’t suffered an eye injury, I think he would have been stopped just the same.
“He was taking a lot of punishment in the late rounds,” said Showtime Boxing analyst and former 2 division world champion Paulie Malignaggi about Brook. “Maybe he knows something we don’t know. He just decided to take the knee. For starters, it was the eye, but he’d also taken a lot of punches. Errol has been punishing him in the later part of the fight. Both team’s game plans was to take each other deep. If you heard Kell Brook’s corner, they thought Errol was going to be vulnerable going into the late rounds, because he’d never been in the late rounds. Obviously, Errol’s corner wanted to go to the late rounds, because they felt, ‘Hey, Kell’s going to struggle to make weight.’ They went to the body early. They executed the entire game plan. They took him late and stopped him late. He’s poised and mature,” said Malignaggi about Spence. “The kid is really young, as far as a world champions go. He’s 26, 27-years-old, so he’s got a bright future. He’s fulfilled his promise to become a world champion. I felt there were moments in the fight where he had to kind of go for it, and really, that youthful energy. When you’re young, you’re willing to go into a fight a little easier than when you’re older. There came a point in the fight where Errol made that decision in the 6th or 7th round, right when he came off balance and took that right hand from Kell. Right after that point, he started steamrolling through Kell, going to the body, to the head. More so than physical, it also made a mental impression on Kell. ‘Man, I can’t stop this guy from coming at me, and he’s really putting a hurting on me.’ He really forced him into submission. He forced him to take a knee first, and eventually got a stoppage. I don’t think it was one particular punch though. He was just putting a hurting on Kell. It was just an accumulation during the fight and he kind of made him submit,” said Malignaggi.
Malignaggi was right about it not being one particular punch from Spence that wore Brook down and caused him to quit. I think it was an accumulation of heavy shots that broke him mentally to the point where he didn’t want to fight any more in the 11th.
“Six rounds in, I had it a tied score,” said Shawn Porter to Thaboxingvoice.com about the Brook-Spence fight. “After that, Spence started to take over. Even in the 9th and 10 rounds after Kell was knocked down, a lot of people thought he was going to be done, and he came back with some more,” said Porter.
Brook did not coming back in any real way after he was hurt in the 9th and 10th. Yeah, Brook landed some shots, but he didn’t come back in a significant way to win rounds 9 and 10. Landing a few token shots isn’t the same thing as coming back. That’s all Brook did was land some token shots in rounds 9-11.
