IBF junior middleweight champion Jermall Charlo (24-0, 18 KOs) was fortunate to hold onto his IBF title tonight in his title defense against challenger Austin Trout (30-3, 17 KOs) at The Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas, Nevada. Charlo, 26, won the fight by a 12 round unanimous decision by the scores of 115-113, 116-112, 116-112.
The fight was close enough to be scored a draw. Charlo fell apart in the second half of the contest in tiring out and getting basically swept by Trout in the last five rounds. Trout fought well enough to win the 1st round. If you do the math, Trout should have been given a draw. However, he was the B-side in this fight and Charlo the A-side. For Trout to have won the fight, he would have needed to really give Charlo a pounding rather than fighting him to a standstill like he did tonight.
Charlo showed the better punching power, but he was clearly dominated in the last half of the fight. He was landing the harder punches but not throwing enough. Trout kept countering him and this bothered Charlo enough to keep him from throwing punches.
In the first three rounds, Charlo looked very strong with the way he was landing big punches to the head of Trout. It looked like at that time that he would KO Trout. However, Charlo faded badly after six rounds, and he looked poor after that point.
Jermall is arguably the better of the Charlo brothers, but what we saw tonight is that he’s still a very, very flawed fighter. Jermall may keep his IBF title for a while, but he doesn’t have the kind of talent where he’s going to hold onto his belt or a decade or be able to move up and beat the likes of Gennady Golovkin. Jermnall doesn’t have that kind of talent. He needs to stay at junior middleweight and avoid the likes of Golovkin at all costs because he’s not going to beat him only fighting hard for half the fight.