Teddy Atlas says he doesn’t feel the Artur Beterbiev vs. Dmitry Bivol fight was a robbery as some have suggested from their undisputed light heavyweight clash last Saturday night in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Fans, especially Bivol’s team, criticized the results of the fight. They think Bivol should have won handily even though he did very little in the second half of the fight. Matchroom promoter Eddie Hearn insists Bivol should have won 8-4.
How the battle was lost
He was adamant Bivol should have won and revealed they had appealed the decision to the four sanctioning bodies to force a rematch with Beterbiev. Bivol basically took off once Beterbeig got his offense into gear and was no different than his previous opponents.
The only difference was that Bivol hit his feet to escape the heavy shelling to save his skin, hoping to win a decision based on his early work. Bivol abandoned the fight after the fourth round, and it was a long bitter retreat, taking fire from his flanks.
The judges saw that Beterbiev did enough to win with the following scores:
– 114-114
– 115-113
– 116-112
Atlas, who has been involved in boxing for many years, felt that former WBA champion Bivol (23-1, 12 KOs) boxed beautifully in the early rounds and combinations against slow-starting IBF, WBC and WBO champion Beterbiev (21) ended up. -0, 20 KOs).
By the midway point of the contest, however, Beterbiev began his offense, and once it did, he never let his foot off the gas pedal. He continued to attack Bivol, 33, holding him like a “cheap suit” and giving him no relief from the pressure.
“When he lets you go downhill, he keeps you downhill; he continues to throw them (hits) as he steps,” Tedy Atlas said of his channeland talks about how Artur Beterbiev took over the fight against Dmitri Bivol once he stepped up his offense in the middle rounds.
“He kicks and punches with you, so you don’t get any relief,” Atlas continued about how Beterbiev followed the retreating Bivol around the ring, beat him and didn’t let him escape in the second half. “He stays right with you, and he follows you. He sticks to you like glue. You can’t get him away from you.”
Atlas perfectly sums up how Beterbiev turned the fight in the sixth round with his offense and Bivol’s relentless pressure. Beterbiev walked through Bivol’s jabs, blocking or absorbing the shots and nailing him with powerful short punches to the head.
In the tenth round, Beterbiev landed a right hand to the body of Bivol, deflating him like a tire. After that punch, the bruised Bivol looked in pure panic. It was as if a grizzly bear had chased him into the woods, and he could not let go of the animal, which repeatedly shot him in the head and body, tearing him to pieces.
CompuBox Final Punch Statistics:
- Beterbiev: 137 landed of 682 thrown for a 20% connection rate.
- Bivol: 142 of 423 for 34%
What those stats don’t show is the power of the punches Beterbiev connected with and their effect on Bivol. Beterbiev’s punch wore Bivol like an old clock, leaving him too weak, hurt and drained to do anything more than run the ring.
Bivol took a charge in rounds 10, 11 and 12 and took punishment from Beterbiev without throwing much of anything back. In the 12th round, Bivol went out with a whimper, holding on and running around the ring.
He surrendered to Beterbiev, and it was sad to see, because before the fight he spoke in bold terms about what he was doing in the competition to do. But when the going got tough, he was surrendered and unwilling to go out on his shield like a soldier in battle.
Bivol wasn’t going to humiliate himself after the fight by arguing that he deserved the decision because he knew he wilted under pressure from Beterbiev and wasn’t going to make a federal case of his loss. However, Bivol should have told Hearn to shut up and not make his side look like a poor loser afterward by crying about the result. It looked so bad with the way Hearn had non-stop stomach pains after the fight and continued to moan for days afterwards.
Hearn made his fighter Bivol look bad with the post-fight scowl that showed he was ultra-salty about the loss and unwilling to take the high road to class.
