By Dan Ambrose: Open scoring will be used for tonight’s fights between Deontay Wilder and Malik Scott, and Danny Garcia and Mauricio Herrera, according to Fightnews. The World Boxing Councils rules will be in play, and one of them is open scoring unfortunately. The scores will be read after the 4th and 8th rounds, which will take away any suspense at all in the fights. The only thing good about is it will likely only affect the Garcia-Herrera fight, because Scott will not be around by the end of the 4th round.
The fights will be taking place at the Coliseo Ruben Rodriguez, Bayamon, Puerto Rico. This is Garcia’s chance to shine in Peurto Rico, where his parents came from.
We saw the ugly affects of open scoring in the Austin Trout vs. Saul “Canelo” Alvarez last year in April in a fight that took place in San Antonio, Texas. Trout fought well enough to deserve the first four rounds of the fight due to him being the much more active fighter. However, the judges still gave Canelo the rounds. That in turn put Trout in a situation where he had to get out of his game plan and fight more aggressively than he wanted to by coming at Canelo instead of boxing him.
Later in the fight when the scores were revealed after the 8th round, the scores were even more lopsided. Trout then became totally desperate to try and make up the rounds that he lost. For his part, Canelo coasted and played it safe in milking his huge lead. So what we had then was a fight that really stopped being interesting after the 8th round due to Canelo going into a big stall to milk his lead.
With the Wilder-Scott and Garcia-Herrera fight being mismatches, it might not matter that there’s open scoring. But it’s still interesting to know which fighter is ahead on the score cards, because it leads to the fight changing due to the desperation of the fighter behind.
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