WBA junior middleweight champion Erislandy Lara (24-2-2, 14 KOs) beat challenger Yuri Foreman (34-3, 10 KOs) by a 4th round TKO tonight at the Hialeah Park Racing and Casino in Miami, Florida. The fight ended with Lara flattening Foreman with a left to the head in the 4th. The fight was stopped at 1:47 of round 4.
Foreman was also knocked down in round 3. That was a beautiful right-leg trip that Lara did, which the referrer never saw. He still called it a knockdown despite no punch landing. Foreman clued the referee in that he blew the call afterwards, but it was too late. The knockdown still counted.
(Photo credit: Ryan Hafey/Premier Boxing Champions)
The ended in round 4 after Lara knocked Foreman down with a left uppercut to the chin. Foreman got back up, but the fight stopped by the referee. This was a real knockdown unlike the first one. There was no way the referee would blow this call too because there was no doubt about it. It was a real knockdown.
In a bold move after the fight, Lara called out Gennady Golovkin and Saul Canelo Alvarez. Lara wants to fight them, but it appears that he doesn’t want to move up to 160. He just wants them to give him a fight. If they ever run out of opposition at 160, then maybe they’ll give Lara a chance. If Lara wants to increase his chances of fighting Canelo and Golovkin, he may need to come out of his comfort zone, stop fighting the weak opposition he’s been facing, and move up to middleweight.
In the co-feature bout, former WBC super middleweight champion Anthony Dirrell (30-1, 24 KOs) beat Norbert Nemesapati (24-4, 17 KOs) by a 6th round knockout. The fight was stopped after round six ended. The referee had seen enough of the one-sided contest and chose to stop the fight. Nemesapati, 21, was no match for Dirrell.
Dirrell hurt Nemesapati with body shots in the 3rd round. Dirrell probably could have finished Nemesapati in the 4th round if he had continued to pour body shots in one after another, but he stopped throwing to the body when some of his punches kept straying low. Dirrell stopped throwing body shots, and focused on landing head shots the rest of the fight.
To show how one-sided the fight was, Dirrell put his hands behind his back in the 5th round and dared the 21-year-old Nemesapati to hit him. The Hungarian fighter chose not to. He wasn’t throwing anything at Dirrell at that point. It was learned afterwards that Nemesapati had injured his left hand, which kept him from throwing punches like he’d been doing in the first couple of rounds.
It really wasn’t a fair fight. When you put in a former world champion against a 21-year-old novice with just a good chin going for him like Nemesapati, you get an outcome like tonight’s mismatch. It’s unfortunate this mismatch was ever sanctioned to begin with. It was always going to be a poor mismatch.
Other boxing results on the card:
Miguel Cruz SD 10 Alex Martin
