Regardless of whether you agreed with them or not, few would have envied the three ringside judges – Marcus McDonnell, Grzegorz Molenda and Salvador Salva – tasked with scoring tonight’s scrappy 10-round light-heavyweight fight between Joshua Buatsi and Zach Parker.
With clean punches in short supply and no flow to the fight at all, the three judges did well to simply remain awake throughout it, never mind follow what unfolded. That they then scored the fight in favour of Buatsi after 10 rounds – by scores of 96-94, 96-94 and 95-95 – came as a surprise to many but was only really a disappointment to Parker and his team.
In truth, the fight was too messy a spectacle for either man to claim any sort of dominance. It started well enough for Parker, with a clean left uppercut releasing Buatsi’s gum shield in round one, and some effective movement in rounds two and three, but soon the fight descended into spoiling on Parker’s part and frustration on Buatsi’s part. Time and time again, in fact, Parker would follow some sharp counterpunching or good body work by tying up Buatsi on the inside and then waiting for the referee, Michael Alexander, to break them up. This, early on, seemed a wise tactic to stifle the favourite, but it wasn’t long before Parker’s holding and his constant flopping to the canvas started to test the patience of both Alexander and the fans inside Manchester’s Co-op Live Arena.
Still, for four rounds, Parker appeared to be executing his game plan well. Indeed, in the fourth, he began to land some flush right hands on Buatsi – all thrown short – and looked to be making a dent in the former 2016 Olympic bronze medallist.
However, as they moved into round five, there was a noticeable drop in Parker’s work-rate and he elected more and more to hold and stall for time. This resulted in his trainer, Errol Johnson, telling Parker at the end of round five: “Don’t f****** go into your shell now!”
What followed that was another nothing round, the sixth, after which Willy Hutchinson, the pair’s domestic rival, described the fight as “terrible” when asked by DAZN’s Dev Sahni for his opinion between rounds. Hutchinson, never one to mince his words, then declared, “I’m going to do this interview with you and then head home.”
If true to his word, Hutchinson wouldn’t have missed much in all honesty. By round seven Buatsi was very much forcing his work in an effort to drag a performance out of himself and the eighth, a round in which neither man did anything of note, was one of the poorest seen in a British ring this year.
Things did pick up a bit in the 10th, thankfully, but nobody in the arena was shouting too loudly for either man at the bout’s conclusion. Sadly, it was just that kind of fight. At no point did it threaten to catch light, let alone explode, and despite the close nature of it, and the controversial nature of the scorecards, few who witnessed tonight’s fight between Buatsi and Parker will be calling for a rematch. Even fewer will choose to watch it should it get made.
“I must admit it wasn’t my best performance,” said Buatsi, now 20-1 (13 KOs), to the sound of boos. “But what do champions do? They win at all costs.
“I don’t know what style that is,” he said of Parker’s spoiling tactics. “You keep holding and going on the floor. How can you do that and claim you won the fight?”
In many ways, although three scorecards suggest otherwise, nobody would have left the arena in Manchester tonight feeling like a winner.
On the undercard, meanwhile, Manchester light-heavyweight Lyndon Arthur nullified Bradley Rea, the European champion, over the course of 12 rounds. Dropped by a left hook in round two, Arthur dusted himself down and dragged himself back into the fight behind an impressive left jab and some even more impressive footwork. Though the fight was action-packed early, Arthur soon got the measure of Rea, 21-2 (10 KOs), and eventually controlled him to run out a winner by scores of 115-113, 115-112 and 114-114. With the win, Arthur, now 25-3 (16 KOs), becomes the new European light-heavyweight champion.
Before Arthur-Rea, most in attendance at the Co-op Live Arena watched Troy Jones, 13-2 (6 KOs), seemingly outbox Liam Cameron, 24-7 (10 KOs), over 10 rounds only to discover that the judges had been watching something different. Rather than reward the work of Jones, the three judges sitting at ringside instead preferred the industry and second-half effort of Cameron. They delivered scores of 97-93 and 96-94 (twice) at the fight’s conclusion, gifting Cameron the win he was looking for following a second-round stoppage loss to Ben Whittaker in April.
