Canelo Alvarez (54-1-2, 36 KOs) put in one of his best performances of his career beating the #1 168-pound fighter in the division in Callum Smith (27-1, 19 KOs) with a 12 round unanimous decision to grab the WBA and WBC super-middleweight titles at the Alamodome in San Antonio, Texas.
Smith disappointingly fought in a negative way throughout the contest, retreating around the ring, covering up on the ropes, and looking more like a sparring partner than a fighter that had come to win.
In the end, Smith hadn’t done nearly enough to deserve a victory. It was good to see Canelo win a decision that wasn’t controversial in nature.
The scores were 19-109, 119-109, and 117-111. Boxing 247 had it for Canelo 12 rounds to 0. Smith didn’t fight well enough to give him even one round, for the reason that he wasn’t letting his hands go.
The 30-year-old Smith suffered a left bicep injury, according to DAZN. Smith’s injury still hasn’t been confirmed, but his left arm did look badly swollen.
It’s unknown when the injury occurred, but if it didn’t happen in the first couple of rounds, then you can’t use that as the excuse for why Smith failed to let his hands go. He looked timid and afraid of being countered by Canelo.
Once Canelo realized that Smith wasn’t going to throw punches back at him, he started teeing off from the second half of the fight onwards. To Smith’s credit, he did a good job of blocking many of Canelo’s shots and making him miss with his upper body movement.
Canelo looked tired and ragged in the later rounds, and that happened Smith survive. That’s all Smith was trying to do by the 10th. He’d given up and was just fighting on.
This wasn’t the Callum Smith that had beaten George Groves in winning the World Boxing Super Series tournament in 2018. Whether the injury that kept Smith from fighting at that level or perhaps an injury is unclear.
Smith landed some massive shots early on in the fight that would have knocked out a lot of fighters, but Canelo took them like they were nothing. Canelo has that bulldog neck, and that helped him absorb the shots from Smith. But with that said, if Smith had continued to hit Canelo with massive uppercuts, he would have had a chance of winning.
By the later rounds of the fight, Canelo was hitting Smith without the worry of what was coming back, and making it a really one-sided match.
After the fight, Smith that he feels that he’s outgrown the 168 lb division, and he was considering going up to 175.
