WBC Silver middleweight champion Martin Murray (29-1-1, 12 KOs) may not have put in an impressive performance tonight in beating #7 WBC Domenico Spada (39-6, 19 KOs) by a 7th round technical decision, but he did earn a potential title shot against WBA middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin with the win.
It’s still up in the air whether Murray and his promoters will go ahead and take the fight with Golovkin, but they at least now are in position to take the fight.
The fight ended in the 7th with the referee marching Spada over to the ringside doctor to have him examine a cut over Spada’s right eye. The ringside doctor then stopped the fight even though the cut really didn’t look all that bad.
The cut occurred in the 3rd round when the two fighters clashed heads. Oddly enough, the referee deducted a point from Murray despite saying that the cut was from an accidental head-butt. Perhaps the referee was confused by the word accidental, and he may have meant to say ‘intentional’.
Murray looked at times tonight in dominating some of the action by staying busy against Spada at the Salle des etoiles in Monte Carlo, Monaco. Murray did a good job of landing jabs, left hooks and right hands. However, he never really hurt Spada.
The scores were 67-66, 68-63 and 69-67.
Spada tried his best to rough Murray up on the inside through much of the fight, but Murray did a good job of holding. At times, Murray would stop holding and would take big shots to the head. He didn’t have an inside game to throw back when in close.
Murray’s lack of an inside game is going to cause him problems when/if he faces Golovkin, because he’s going to get hit with a lot of hard body shots. Murray does a great job of covering up his head, but he’s less effective at stopping body punches.
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In the co-feature bout, former Stuart Hall (16-4-2, 7 KOs) came up short in losing by a 12 round unanimous decision to undefeated Randy Caballero (22-0, 13 KOs) in their fight for the vacant IBF bantamweight title. Hall got off to a bad start in getting dropped in the 2nd round. Despite the poor start, Hall fought Caballero pretty much to a standstill in the fight. The judges scored the fight 116-111, 116-111 and 118-110.
Hall appeared to get the better of Caballero in most of the rounds from the 3rd round on, and it’s hard to understand what the judges saw in Caballero, because he was definitely outworked by Hall.