By Dan Ambrose: Max Kellerman of HBO says he isn’t certain WBC super flyweight champion Srisaket Sor Rungvisai (44-4-1, 31 KOs) did enough on Saturday night to deserve his 12 round majority decision win over former WBA/WBO flyweight champion Juan Francisco Estrada (36-3, 25 KOs) in their SuperFly2 bout on HBO Boxing After Dark at the Forum in Inglewood, California.
Kellerman felt that the 27-year-old Estrada’s punches did more damage than Rungvisai’s shots in the fight, even though he doesn’t hit as hard as the Thailand fighter. Kellerman says that Estrada’s punches marked up Rungvisai’s face more than his shots did to him. Rungvisai was throwing more body shots, and not head-hunting the way Estrada was.
Whether Kellerman believes Rungvisai deserved the decision or not, the Thailand fighter won the fight by the judges scores 117-111, 115-113 and 114-114. Kellerman doesn’t score fights officially, so his opinion about Estrada deserving the win doesn’t matter.
Rungvisai out-boxed Estrada in the first 6 rounds, and he piled up an insurmountable lead during that part of the fight. Estrada, 27, came back in the second half, but he had too much ground to make up for him to get the win.
“Rungvisai is a guy that went from a crowd-pleasing aggressive puncher to a fighter who looks like he might be great,” Kellerman said. ”He might be headed for the Hall of Fame. He is the SuperFly champion of the world, and he did it by out-boxing in stretches a master boxer himself in Estrada, who by the way looks to me like a 15 round fighter fighting in a 2 round era. As Andre [Ward] said, he’s a back half fighter and maybe ran out of rounds to win tonight,” Kellerman said.
It’s too bad Estrada wasn’t around when there were 15 round fights, but that’s his problem. He’s going to need to learn how to adapt his game to start quicker in his fights so he can be a front half fighter and not give away his wins like he did against Rungvisai and Roman Gonzalez. However, I don’t agree that Estrada did enough to come back and win the fight the way Kellerman maintains. On my unofficial scoring of the fight, I had Estrada winning rounds 2 and 12. He didn’t do enough to win the 8th or the 10th round like HBO scored it. Estrada only landed shots in the last part of those rounds, and he didn’t do enough to win them.
”By the way, I’m not convinced that he didn’t win tonight,” Kellerman said of Estrada.
For Kellerman to think that Estrada deserved the win over Rungvisai, he would be ignoring all those huge shots that he was landing in rounds 1 to 11. Is Rungvisai had lost the fight tonight, a lot of boxing fans would have furious over the outcome. There were a lot of boxing fans angry tonight about Estrada losing the fight. It would be much worse if Rungvisai lost because there were more fans that thought he deserved the win than Estrada.
”That was a close, tough fight, and there was some rounds that we gave to Rungvisai, because it felt like he was a puncher with momentum that if you watch closely, Estrada seemed to land a lot of effective punches himself,” Kellerman said. ”This was a close, tough fight, and the scoring reflected that.”