Kovalev stops Pascal – results

By Kevin Chittenden - 01/30/2016 - Comments

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IBF/WBA/WBO light heavyweight champion Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev (29-0-1, 26 KOs) gave 33-year-old Jean Pascal (30-4-1, 17 KOs) a real pounding tonight in a prolonged beating that finally ended when Pascal’s new trainer Freddie Roach pulled him out of the fight after the 7th round at the Bell Centre in Montreal, Canada.

Pascal was hurt in the 5th round from a right hand by Kovalev. It was a round that was painful to watch because the fight should have arguably been stopped at that point due to all the sledgehammer shots Pascal absorbed.

The only round in which Pascal put in a token effort of trying to actually fight was in the third round. He attacked Kovalev in the last seconds of the round with a brief flurry of head-snapping shots. It was a good late flurry by Pascal, but he didn’t do anything in the rest of the fight to follow up on the good work.

Pascal was effectively finished after the 3rd round. He was little more than a punching bag in rounds 4, 5, 6 and 7. You can count on two hands the amount of punches Pascal landed in all four of those rounds combined. He landed almost nothing. It was all one-way traffic for Kovalev, and the only thing interesting about it was wondering when Pascal’s trainer Roach would pull the plug on the mismatch.

Kovalev put Pascal down in the 1st round from a hard jab. The referee gave Pascal a break by saying it was from a slip, but it was clearly a knockdown. It didnt matter though, because Pascal wasn’t going to do anything in this fight anyway. He was far worse than he was in the first fight, and it’s disappointing that Kovalev’s promoters at Main Events and HBO wasted time by facing Pascal again.

You have to hope that Kovalev won’t be dredging up additional recycled past opponents in the future to fight rather than looking to face new guys, because it’s just not interesting. HBO should have been the one to say no to a second Kovalev-Pascal mismatch. Unfortunately, they agreed to show it and the fans got a lousy fight that wasn’t worth watching in my opinion. Hopefully this ends the Kovalev-Pascal rivalry because the last things fans need is Pascal being trotted out for a third fight against Kovalev next year if only because Pascal is popular in Canada.

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The co-feature bout between welterweights Dmitry Mikhaylenko (20-0, 9 KOs) and Karim Mayfield (19-3-1, 11 KOs) was about as competitive as the main event. In other words, it was sickeningly one-sided with the bigger, stronger, and more talented Mikhaylenko battering Mayfield like a drum around the ring. Mayfield was hurt numerous times in the fight, and he couldn’t do anything about it due to his lack of size and punching power. The judges scored the fight 100-90, 100-90 and 99-91.

Other boxing results on the card:

Vislan Dalkhaev UD 4 Alan Salazar
Joel Diaz TKO 2 Abraham Gomez
David Theroux TKO 3 Juan Armando Garcia
Steven Butler UD 8 Antonio Hoffman
Cassius Chaney TKO 3 Zoltan Csala
Virgilijus Stapulionis TKO 2 Laszlo Fazekas