Using his huge 6’5″ size, Lawrence Okolie (16-0, 13 KOs) put on a masterclass performance in thoroughly dominating the smaller Krzysztof Glowacki (31-3, 19 KOs) in stopping him in round six with a powerful right hand to the head to win the vacant WBO cruiserweight title at the Wembley Arena in London, England.
With Glowacki unable to pull the trigger on his shots, Okolie hit him at will with jabs and right hands to the head, bloodying his left eye.
In the sixth, Okolie landed a perfectly timed right hand to drop Glowacki flat on his back. When Glowacki stumbled back to his feet, referee Marcus McDonnell stepped in and stopped the fight. The time of the stoppage was at 0:46 in round six.
- 154-lb contender Anthony Fowler (14-1, 11 KOs) won his fifth straight victory in stopping Jorge Fortea (21-2-1, 7 KOs) by a third-round knockout. Fortea was floored twice in the third round. Fowler, 30, looks like a different fighter from the guy that Scott Fitzgeral defeated in 2019.
- Cruiserweight Chris Billam-Smith (12-1, 10 KOs) put on a masterclass performance, beating Vasil Ducar (9-4-1, 8 KOs) by a one-sided 10 round unanimous decision. The game but limited Ducar hit the deck in the 4th and 6th round, but he soldiered on bravely until the bitter end. The judge’s scores: 99-90, 99-90, and 97-92.
- Female featherweight prospect Ramla Ali (2-0, 0 KOs) kept her unbeaten record intact with a six-round points decision win over Bec Connolly (3-9, 0 KOs). The score: 60-55.
Preview:
Lawrence Okolie (15-0, 12 KOs) will be looking to win his first world title as a professional against Krzysztof Glowacki (31-2, 19 KOs) for the vacant WBO cruiserweight belt tonight in a Matchroom Boxing promoted show at 3 pm ET at the Wembley Arena in London, UK.
Okolie, 6’5″, is the favorite going into tonight, and it would be more than a shock if he were to lose to the 34-year-old Glowacki. It’s not that the Polish fighter is a lesser guy.
Krzysztof has got a lot of talent and punching power to go along with it, but he’s been out of the ring since 2019 and he’s no spring chicken. But as the saying goes, ‘power is the last thing to go,’ and Glowacki has plenty of that.
Additionally, Okolie isn’t the second coming of Evander Holyfield in the chin department. We’ve seen him getting staggered by woeful opposition at the pro level, and who can forget what Erislandy Savon did to Okolie in 2016.
Glowacki is counting on Okolie’s chin betraying him tonight, and he could be right.
What the boxing public is hoping for is we don’t see another ugly clinch-fest display from Okolie, as we’ve seen many times from him as a professional.
It seems like anytime Okolie faces someone that throws punches back at him in self-defense, he reverts to his grabbing, and it’s so ugly to watch. Okolie doesn’t do the holding because of fatigue issues.
It’s more of a survival thing where he lacks the defensive skills to block punches the way normal fighters do, so he does the only thing he can, which is to grab and hold all night.
Okolie will throw a big right-hand shot and then fall forward into a clinch. The referee will then separate him from his opponent, and the process will repeat itself.
The good news for boxing fans is Okolie didn’t hold in his last fight against 2nd-tier fighter Nikodem Jezewski last December.
On the other hand, Okolie didn’t need to because his opponent was so horribly bad that it wasn’t even a fight. Nikodem looked totally unprepared to fight against a world-class fighter.
“I have big aspirations for myself, but he as a coach has his aspirations,” said Okolie to Sky Sports News about his trainer Shane McGuigan.
“When I win, he wins. As long as I’m able to get a good knockout, no matter what, it’s going to be a great moment, but I want it to be impactful,” said Okolie.
