By Michael Collins: Arthur Abraham (34-3, 27 KO’s) defeated an over-matched, under-powered Piotr Wilczewski (30-3, 10 KO’s) by a 12 round unanimous decision on Saturday night by the scores 118-109, 118-109 and 119-108 at the Sparkassen-Arena, Kiel, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany.
Abraham controlled basically the entire fight with his powerful jab and combinations. Wilczewski couldn’t match Abraham’s power and it was pretty obvious even from the start that he wasn’t going to be a threat to Abraham. Most of the rounds saw Wilczewski landing more punches while Abraham covered up in his turtle shell defense. Wilczewski mostly landed on Abraham’s guard. In strategic points in the round, Abraham would lower his guard and come alive with wild attacks with most shots missing. He was able to land it least two good shots for every ten punches thrown.
In the 11th round, Abraham hurt Wilczewski while in the process of throwing one of his flurries in the last 30 seconds of the round.. Unfortunately for Abraham, he started too late in the round because if he had done this earlier in the round he would likely finished Wilczewski off. As it was, Wilczewski was holding on for dear life as the round end.
In the 7th, Wilczewski lost a point for the use of his head. It was a very quick call and it made you wonder why the referee wasn’t calling Abraham for all the rabbit punches and forearms he was landing, which seemed to be far, far worse than the foul that Wilczewski made.
The win keeps alive the 32-year-old Abraham’s hope of taking on the winner of the May clash between WBO super middleweight champion Robert Stieglitz and challenger George Groves. Abraham proved that he’s at least good enough to compete with those guys, if not the better fighters in the division like Andre Ward, Andre Dirrell, Carl Froch and Lucian Bute.
Abraham would have lost any of those guys tonight and he would have lost badly. Abraham looked very slow and showed the same tendencies to cover up in his clash shell defense for long stretches of every round. Abraham would interrupt these long rest breaks with wild flurries occasionally with most of the punches missing Wilczewski by a mile. Had this been someone that knew how to counter and hand some speed and power, Abraham would have been embarrassed. You got to credit his management team for picking out Wilczewski from the 2nd tier because he was perfect for Abraham. But this wasn’t a top 15 fighter that Abraham was in with tonight. Wilczewski was clearly 2nd tier and lacked power, speed and just good decision making. He fought poorly with the limited skills that he had and gave Abraham even more of the fight than he deserved.
Overall, I thought Abraham looked terrible, just as awful as he had in three losses in the Super Six tournament. The only difference here is he was fighting a guy NOT from the top 15, but a B level fighter without the skills needed to compete with Abraham and thrash him like the Super Six fighters had done.
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EBU light heavyweight champion Eduard Gutknecht (24-1, 9 KO’s) had to really battle to scrape out a 12 round split decision over over Tony Averlant (17-6-2, 4 KO’s) to retain his European Boxing Union title. The final judges’ scores were 115-113 and 114-113 for the 30-year-old Gutknecht and 115-113 for Averlant. Gutknecht knocked Averlant down late in the 1st round with a nice left hook. But he had problems with Averlant in many of the rounds, especially in the 2nd half of the fight when Averlant’s high work rate and excellent jab began to take control over the fight. Gutknecht won most of the first six rounds of the fight with his cleaner landing shots, but it wasn’t really impressive stuff. He lacks power and didn’t look much better than Averlant, who can’t punch either.
In the second half of the fight, Gutknecht was completely exhausted and constantly grabbing Averlant in clinches where he would grind his head into Averlant while the referee did zero in terms of taking points away. Gutknecht’s arms were like noodles with the little power that he had completely gone. I had Averlant winning pretty much all of the second of the fight due to Gutknecht’s exhaustion.
This is a fight that there really needs to be a rematch you couldn’t really tell who the better fighter was and a draw would have been a better outcome than a win for Gutknecht. Of course, I don’t see Averlant getting a rematch but he certainly deserves one.
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In other action on the card:
Tyron Zeuge TKO 1 Yauheni Bohdanouski
Henry Weber UD 8 Lorenzo Di Giacomo
Robert Woge KO 3 Carl Dilks
Mateusz Masternak TKO 10 Felipe Romero