Last night, Britains brave Martin Murray put in a terrific performance in surviving a Gennady Golovkin masterclass for a full ten rounds before ultimately being stopped at the start of the eleventh. Murray was falling to a bad habit of languishing on the ropes and allowing Golovkin to tee off on him with power shots. Whilst the two fighters were in the centre of the ring we saw Murray landing rights to the head and shots to the body but never enough to deter Golovkin.
The impressive thing about Murrays performance was that he found a way to avoid enough of Golovkins work to survive and what he couldn’t avoid he took well. He was knocked down two times in the fourth round mainly due to body work from Golovkin, but would then rally and get it together through the later rounds. Before a third knockdown which came in the tenth. By the time the eleventh round began Murray was visibly fatigued and did not look as though he was going to be able to keep up the fight for another six minutes.
The thing is with the case of Golovkin, he is such a dominant champion that simply surviving to see the scorecards would be a massive boost to a fighters career and I believe that is what we could/should have seen.
Murray outlasted world class fighters like Rubio and Geale who were blown out in 2-3 rounds but seeing as he was ultimately stopped anyway this effort will likely be forgotten about. If the referee had allowed the fight to go on we could have seen Murray come back again to survive and it would only have been one more round after that before the final bell. Golovkin would have his KO streak ended and would have seen the twelfth round for the first time in his career. He does have 3 points wins on his resume, but those came a long time ago when Golovkin was involved in eight round bouts.
It is a funny situation because as the rounds were getting along I found myself just interested in how long Murray could last, I knew if he could find his way into the elventh it would be Golovkins longest fight, and he succeeded in doing that, but as open scoring was in play, I knew he couldn’t get a decision anyway. I just thought it would be a great feat for Murray to have achieved and he could then say he has gone the rounds with three of the best middleweights around in Sturm, Martinez and Golovkin. Many see this as Murrays first true loss as the previous two names were very controversial decisions in the home fighters backyard. Nevertheless, Martin Murray had a decent showing all things considered and should be able to land another decent fight off the back of this performance.
