By Radio Rahim
Virgil Hunter, the head trainer for WBO, WBA, IBF light heavyweight champion Andre Ward (31-0, 15KOs), feels confident that his fighter would have been able to stop Sergey Kovalev (30-1-1, 26KOs) - if last Saturday's fight would played out on the inside.
To get that win, Ward had to recover from a very bad start. Kovalev came out very strong in the first round and then dropped Ward in the second. When Ward came back to the corner, following the knockdown, Hunter advised him to 'take the fight' to Kovalev.
"I told him that you're going to have to take it to him, and that you're not going to freeze like all the other cowards that froze, all of the other guys who fought him and were in awe of him. You can't be in awe of him. You have to take it to him. You might get knocked down, but you get up, chew it up and spit it out," Hunter told BoxingScene.com.
By the fifth round of the fight, Hunter felt his boxer had the action under the control. All three of the official judges scored the fight for Ward by a single point, with tallies of 114-113 at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.
Hunter felt his boxer was more than capable of securing a stoppage victory with an inside fight. In the weeks leading up to the fight, they were expecting Kovalev to stand with them on the inside, but that didn't happen.
"After the fourth round [I felt Ward regained control], because I saw him closing the distance. And when Andre was trying to take him inside to fight, [Kovalev] didn't want to fight. He just wanted to grab and hold him," Hunter said.
"And that's why I'm disappointed, because he has this persona of being the 'Krusher' - but on the inside he's the kitty. He's not the Krusher, he's the kitty. If he would have fought on the inside, like we felt he would, [Ward] would have stopped him."
