In a fight much tougher than expected, WBO cruiserweight champion Marco Huck (38-2-1, 27 KOs) had to battle hard to defeat the game fringe contender Mirko Larghetti (21-1, 13 KOs) by a 12 round unanimous decision tonight to retain his WBO title at the Gerry Weber Stadium, Halle, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany. The final judges scores were 116-112, 116-112 and 118-110. The last score was ridiculous. Larghetti dominated most of the fight, and he definitely didn’t deserve to lose by an 118-110 score.
With little time remaining in the 12th, Huck hurt the 31-year-old Larghetti with a big right hand after cornering him. Huck then unloaded a flurry of shots until Larghetti hit the canvas. Larghetti was knocked down after the bell. He was knocked out, but the referee said that he was knocked out after the bell.
I had Huck trailing in the fight at the time 7 rounds to 4. Huck was beaten to the punch by the much faster and busier Larghetti in the first 8 rounds. However, Huck started landed a hard elbow in the 9th, and then nailed Larghetti with additional hard elbows in the 10th and 11th. The shots seemed to take a lot out of Larghetti.
The referee warned Huck about the use of the elbow in the 11th, but by then it was too late, he’d already nailed Larghetti with some really hard shots.
Larghetti was cut under his right eye in the 5th, but he was able to fight well because the blood was falling down his cheek and didn’t obscure his vision.
In rounds 5 and 6, Larghetti appeared to hurt Huck with hard right hands to the head. Huck was walking into a lot of the punches Larghetti was throwing and that made them a lot harder.
Near the end of the 8th round, Larghetti nailed Huck with a left-right combination that had Huck backing away and covering up.
All in all, Huck did not look good in this fight at all. His promoters at Sauerland would be wise to keep him far away from the best fighters in the division like Thabisio Mchunu, Rakhim Chakhkiev and Denis Lebedev. I believes those guys would all beat Huck at this point in his career, because he seems to have lost something from his wars with Firat Arslan and Ola Afolabi.
Huck will likely be facing 47-year-old former WBO cruiserweight champion Johnny Nelson in the near future. It seems like that fight is very likely to happen. Huck tied Nelson’s record for the most title defenses at 13 tonight with the win over Larghetti, and it seems pretty obvious that Nelson is going to be facing him in 2015.
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In a controversial fight, heavyweight Denis Boytsov (34-1. 26 KOs) defeated Timur Masafarov (6-2, 5 KOs) by a 10 round unanimous decision. The judges scored the fight 95-94, 98-92 and 97-93.
Masafarov dominated the last 6 rounds against a very, very tired and constantly clinching Boytsov. At best, you can call the fight a draw, but Masafarov definitely deserved the win because he badly outworked a very tired looking Boystov in the last 6 rounds. It was surprising that the referee didn’t take points off from Boytsov for his constant clinching because he was holding nonstop for the last 6 rounds.
Boytsov fought like he had only trained to go 4 rounds. He didn’t have the engine to stand and trade with Masafarov, who was throwing nonstop punches all night long. In the first four rounds, Boytsov’s superior power had him winning most of the rounds, but after that, he was just holding and taking head shots left and right.
The referee kept warning Masfarov for punches that he was landing on the belt line of Boytsov. It’s unclear if the referee wasn’t seeing correctly or if he felt that punches shouldn’t be allowed on the belt line. Never the less, he got in the way of Masafavor’s work numerous times in the last 5 rounds when he was working over a tired Boytsov.
I’m not sure where Boytsov goes from here. Sauerland is going to need to figure some things out, because this performance, as well as Boytsov’s previous one against Alex Leapai, suggests that he doesn’t have the talent to be a major player in the heavyweight division. Boytsov doesn’t have the stamina or the size to mix it up with the top tier in the division in my estimation. Sauerland needs to convince him to move down to cruiserweight because it’s just not going to happen at heavyweight for him. I see Boytsov as another Edmund Gerber and that’s it.In other words, Boytsov isn’t going anywhere.
