Sergey Kovalev vs. Igor Mikhalkin – Results

By Boxing News - 03/04/2018 - Comments

Image: Sergey Kovalev vs. Igor Mikhalkin – Results

By Jim Dower: WBO light heavyweight champion Sergey ‘Krusher’ Kovalev (32-2-1, 28 KOs) did what many boxing fans expected him to in defeating voluntary challenger Igor Mikhalkin (21-2, 9 KOs) by a 7th round TKO on Saturday night at Madison Square Garden in New York. Boxing News 24 had Kovalev by 5 of 6 rounds at the time of the stoppage in the 7th.

The fight was stopped in the 7th round due to how beaten up the 32-year-old Mikhalkin was. He was bleeding and taking severe punishment. The ringside doctor and referee had been keeping a close eye on Mikhalkin since the 6th round due to the punishment he’d absorbed in this one-sided fight.

Had Mikhalkin been competitive, then perhaps they would have given him some leeway to stay in the fight, but this wasn’t a competitive fight. It was a mismatch. It was the second poor match-up in a row for Kovalev, whose management is putting him in with softer opposition nowadays after his 2 defeats to Andre Ward.

Kovalev hurt Mikhalkin with a right hand to the head in the 2nd round. But when he failed to knock him out, Kovalev began to fade by the 5th round. This is the same point that Kovalev had gassed out in his 2 fights with Ward and his match with Isaac Chilemba in 2016. Kovalev changed trainers recently in swapping out his longtime trainer John David Jackson for a Russian coach. Supposedly, the new coach had fixed Kovalev’s stamina problems. Unfortunately, that didn’t turn out to be the case, as Kovalev was just as bad stamina-wise as he’d been in the past.

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Kovalev, 34, really labored at times and he looked and fought his age. This wasn’t the impressive Kovalev we’d seen years ago or even in his recent fight against Vyacheslav Shabranskyy last November. Kovalev fought like he was tired. He was lucky that Mikhalkin had little punching power to cause him problems, because this is fight that he would have struggled with against a good fighter.

Mikhalkin wasn’t good enough to take advantage of Kovalev’s fatigue the way Andre Ward had in his 2 wins over the Russian fighter. If Mikhalkin knew how to throw body shots, he might have knocked Kovalev out the way Ward did. Ward isn’t a puncher either, but he knew Kovalev was weak when it came to taking body shots. Mikhalkin failed to follow the blueprint Ward created and that’s one of the reasons why he lost.

Mikhalkin landed some shots in the fight, but they didn’t have enough punching power to give Kovalev any problems.

About the only thing good I can say about Mikhalkin is he did a good job of taking shots from Kovalev. Other than that, Mikhalkin was totally out of his league in the fight and didn’t belong inside the same ring.

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Image: Sergey Kovalev vs. Igor Mikhalkin – Results

Image: Sergey Kovalev vs. Igor Mikhalkin – Results

Image: Sergey Kovalev vs. Igor Mikhalkin – Results

Image: Sergey Kovalev vs. Igor Mikhalkin – Results

Image: Sergey Kovalev vs. Igor Mikhalkin – Results

Image: Sergey Kovalev vs. Igor Mikhalkin – Results