In his first fight on Sky Sports, #1 WBA Chris Eubank Jr. (20-1, 15 KOs) wiped out his carefully selected opponent Tony Jeter (20-5-1, 14 KOs) by a 2nd round knockout on Saturday night in a fight that was over shortly after it was started at the Sheffield Arena in Sheffield, UK. Jeter hit the deck in the 1st round, and then was stopped on his feet not long after the start of the 2nd round.
There’s a certain amount of debate whether the referee Howard Foster should have stopped the fight because Jeter looked like he could have taken some more shots. The crowd certainly didn’t like the stoppage. They booed it. Instead of booing the stoppage, he crowd should have booed Eubank Jr’s promoter Eddie Hearn, because he’s the one that setup this fight, which was a mismatch before the first punches was even thrown. Jeter didn’t have a prayer the moment the contracts were signed.
Jeter was knocked down by a left hook in the 1st round. He made it out of the round by holding on and moving around the ring. There was only a minute left in the round, so it wasn’t that difficult for Jeter to survive. Things would have been more difficult if he had done something foolish like standing with his back against the ropes, which is what Jeter did at the start of the 2nd round.
In fairness to Hearn, he never intended the Eubank Jr. vs. Jeter fight to be in the main event. It just ended up that way after Kell Brook suffered a rib injury that caused him to pull out of his headliner fight against Diego Chaves. Rather than scrap the card, the Eubank Jr-Jeter mismatch was moved up to the main event. It was a terrible fight even for a co-feature bout though, it was kind of embarrassing that Sky Sports agreed to have this fight take place in a main even on their card tonight.
In the 1st round, Eubank Jeter landed a big left-right combination that sent Jeter flying across the ring into the ropes. Had the ropes not been there, he would have been knocked down. From that point, it was just a matter of time before Eubank Jr. finished Jeter off.
“I’m ready for Spike O’Sullivan,” Eubank Jr. said after the fight. “He’s been talking a lot of mess and it’s time for some punishment. Please back these words because I’m going to be going in there like an animal and I hope you’re ready for it. Everything been working smoothly. There’s been no clash. It has been smooth in the changing room and as you guys saw it, it was smooth up on there on the big stage. This is a taste of things to come.”
The idea is for Eubank Jr. to defeat O’Sullivan on December 12th at the O2 Arena in London, UK. After that, Eubank Jr. will face the winner of the December 5th fight between Peter Quillin and WBA middleweight champion Daniel Jacobs. Eubank Jr. might have to wait a while before that fight takes place, because it’s likely that the winner of the Quillin-Jacobs fight will take one to three voluntary title defenses before they get around to facing Eubank Jr, if they ever do. Al Haymon manages Quillin and Jacobs, and you never know if he’ll have the winner of that fight vacate rather than fight Eubank Jr.
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EBU super bantamweight champion Gavin McDonnell (14-0-2, 4 KOs) beat challenger Jeremy Parodi (37-3-1, 9 KOs) by a 12 round unanimous decision on the undercard. The scores were 117-111, 117-111 and 118-110.
