By Brock Ellis
DANIEL Geale made the first successful defense of his IBF middleweight title in impressive fashion with a totally dominant rout of the durable but overmatched Eromosele Albert in-front of a sold-out home crowd at the Derwent Entertainment Centre overnight in Tasmania, Australia.
Geale, 30, a former Commonwealth Games Gold Medalist, is the first and only Australian to ever win a world-title in Germany and was coming off a career-best victory in his dethroning of former champion Sebastian Sylvester just over three months ago.
It was a dominating performance by Geale, in which he gained momentum with every passing round and dominated the US-based Nigerian, who has only been stopped once in twenty-eight fights as a professional.
To the delight of the enthusiastic home-crowd, who had only previously seen the defending champion fight twice in his home state - Geale put on a boxing clinic as he looked a class-above Albert, 37, who had previously shared the ring with promising prospects such as the big-punching American James Kirkland and the classy IBO & interim WBO light-middleweight champion Zaurbek Baysangurov.
Geale (26-1, 15 KOs), showed his now trade-mark patience in tracking down Albert (24-5-1, 12 KOs), whose movement and at times refusal to take a backwards step could have caused the defending champion problems. However, Geale managed to successfully maneuver around the ring and continually catch the forward-footed Albert with clean and fast combinations.
It was a master-class by Geale, who arguably won every round of their contest with the exception of the fourth – which is being generous to Albert. To his credit, Albert continued to walk forward and eat flurries of shots from Geale – who switched back and forth from orthodox and southpaw stances throughout the fight. Albert’s frustrated corner attempted to motivate their charge by stating he was “not doing enough” and that he was “losing every round”.
Coming into the fight, Geale’s co-promoter Gary Shaw put to record that after the Albert title defense; Geale would look to defend his crown only once more in Australia before heading over to the US.
This potentially leaves the door open for a rematch against former conqueror Anthony Mundine, who is the only man to defeat Geale. However, with Mundine facing Rigoberto Alvarez next month for one-third of the WBA light-middleweight title and the winner likely to face ‘regular’ WBA light-middleweight champion Austin Trout in December – a fight against Geale does look unlikely.
At the conclusion of twelve rounds, the judges unanimously scored the fight in Geale’s favour with judge Somsak Sirianant scoring the bout 116-112, while judges Robert Hoyle and Ray Reed scored the bout 117-11 and 119-109 respectively.
An ecstatic Geale - who is on a five-fight win streak, heaped praise on the full-house that turned up to watch him defend his crown against Albert.
“I hope you guys love a war, cause’ God damn that was a war. He was very tough, I never said anything to anybody but my right-hand was buggered all the way through. I hope you guys loved it cause’ that’s what I wanted to do from day one”.
Albert, who has now lost three of his last six-fights, was critical of Geale’s performance and lamented the champion’s style and unwillingness to stand in the centre of the ring for long periods of time.
“He had a lot of the crowd supporting him. Daniel Geale is a pretty good fighter, he’s very technical and he moves well” Albert continued, “It is very difficult to fight somebody who doesn’t want to fight”.
With the victory, Geale can now look towards bigger fights against higher-caliber opponents – but was not exactly sure as to who is next opponent will be and where it will take place.
“We’re not out there to take easy fights and this was a tough fight. You know the worlds at our feet - you know, we’ve got the belt. We are going to keep fighting better fighters”.
Follow Brock Ellis on Twitter @brockellis01.
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