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By Alexey Sukachev
Fights can be interesting and stinky. They can be exciting and boring. And then there are strange, freaky fights. It was clearly the case for a contest which at Marcel Cerdan Palace of Sports in Levallois-Perret, France. It's where WBC #10 light heavyweight Danny McIntosh (13-1, 7 KOs) clowned his way into the eleventh round, and to the brink of disqualification for extreme showboating and illegal tactics, only to take out horribly frozen Frenchman Thierry Karl (28-5, 18 KOs) with a wild flurry of punches. McIntosh is the new EBU light heavyweight champion.
McIntosh, whose only loss came against WBO interim champion Nathan Cleverly, didn't do much from round one. He was dancing around robotic Karl, showing his tremendous flexibility, talked a whole lot and accompanied this with some similar stuff to bother both the Frenchman and Italian referee Guido Cavalleri. The only thing he totally ignored in the process was boxing and hitting his opponent with his punches. The starting rounds were mostly in Karl's favour as WBC #8 and WBA #12 ranked 175lber showed some undeniable desire to win the fight. He did connect with some punches but otherwise his reflexes, his speed and his punches proved to be too soft for the British fighter.
Anger raised up in the eighth when Cavalleri finally took a point off McIntosh for hitting behind the back of the head and some roughhouse tactics. It looked though that it was Karl who was getting tiresome quicker. And it proved right as McIntosh suddenly started to fight seriously at the end of the ninth. Then he clearly took the eleventh round with his combination punching while the Frenchman was just too phlegmatic and even melancholic to deliver anything of note.
Finally, in the eleventh stanza Karl's tank was almost empty. Feeling a proxmity of an upset, McIntosh doubled his punch output and his desire and soon got Karl into trouble. He delivered punches at will until referee stepped in to take Karl out of ropes. It didn't save him though as McIntosh just finished him off with another series of blows which had the Frenchman reeling across the ring and onto the canvas. A huge win for clowning Danny McIntosh and a major step back for a way-too-serious Karl.
