In moving back down to middleweight, Martin Murray (35-4-1, 16 KOs) kept his career alive on Saturday night with a 12 round majority decision win over high level journeyman Gabriel Rosado (23-11, 13 KOs) on Saturday night at the Echo Arena in Liverpool, England. Murray used his precise punching to win rounds over the 31-year-old Rosado, who got off to a bad start in the first 7 rounds.
By the time Rosado finally started to pressure Murray the way he needed to, he was trailing badly. Murray did finish well in appearing to get the better of the 34-year-old Murray in the last part of the fight.
The scoring by the judges was all over the place. The scores were as follows: 119-109, 116-112, and 114-114. The judge that had Murray winning 119-109 didn’t give Rosado any credit for a lot of the rounds in which he landed a good many shots. Murray didn’t appear to win 11 rounds or even 10 rounds tonight. You can say that Murray was the better fighter, but not by a 119-109 score.
Rosado looked like he didn’t have the size to handle Murray much of the time. Murray looked a lot bigger and stronger than Rosado inside the ring. However, Gennady Golovkin proved that he could beat Murray despite being outsized by him as well in their fight in 2015. Unfortunately for Rosado, he didn’t possess the same type of punching power that Golovkin had in order to handle Murray’s size advantage.
After the fight, Rosado was incensed with the scoring from the one judge that scored the fight 119-109. The score was a bad one. Rosado didn’t fight well enough to get the win. That’s all that matters. Murray had too much size and too much technical boxing skills for Rosado to deal with. You could see right off the bat that Murray was the more technical fighter. His added size made it really hard for Rosado to compete in this fight.
The thing that Rosado could have done would have been to throw a lot of shots in the way that Sergio Martinez did in beating Murray in 2015. Rosado couldn’t do that.