Trainer Joe Gallagher is up in arms over the controversy from his fighter, IBF female welterweight champion Natasha Jonas, winning what many fans felt was a classic example of a hometown decision, defeating visiting fighter Mikaela Mayer last Saturday night at the M&S Bank Arena in Liverpool, England.
The boxing world overwhelmingly had the American Mayer (19-2, 5 KOs) winning, and many agreed with the judge that scored it 97-93 in her favor as being the right score over the other two oddball scores of 96-95 and 95-94 for the British fighter, Jonas (15-2-1, 9 KOs).
Gallagher’s Outcry
“When you’re a challenger in someone else’s backyard,” you’ve got to rip the title away, and she didn’t,” said Gallagher to talkSPORT Boxing.
What Gallagher appears to be saying here is that the champion should be allowed to keep their titles if the fight is close, even if the challenger does enough to deserve the win.
In other words, the only way the challenger can beat the hometown champion is to dominate them one-sided. That’s kind of pathetic, isn’t it? That means that the ONLY way a challenger can unseat a champion is by knockout or total domination. There can be no close wins.
In this case, it wasn’t a close fight because Mayer out-punched, outworked, and outfought the smaller, weaker, and older 39-year-old Jonas from A to B. There was nothing close to the fight, as Mayer was unloading on the hapless Jonas with her high punch output and had too much firepower for her.
This writer had it 9-1 for Mayer, with one mercy round given to Jonas in the first. Really, you can make an argument that Mayer won ten rounds to zero over Mayer because she outworked her the entire fight and made it look so easy.
“I think the controversy is the 97-93 card for Mayer; I don’t know what that judge was watching,” said a complaining Galagher. “Even Sky’s commentary, they’re backtracking now – Dave Coldwell, why was he commentating? Where was Carl Froch, Matthew Macklin, guys that know their boxing.”
What planet is Gallagher from? Did he not watch the fight, or what? His fighter Jonas looked ancient inside the ring, getting battered from the word go by Mayer and schooled in every sense of the word. This kind of junk makes fighters not want to come to the UK to fight world champions.
