By Robert Brown: Last Saturday night we had two fighters in contrasting situations wanting to make big impressions on the boxing public for two entirely different reasons. We had Tavoris Cloud the light Heavyweight Champion of the world, who was determined to make a stunning impression in his first big major TV date to help launch his career and assist him in his dreams of getting fights against marquee names such as Chad Dawson and Bernard Hopkins.
The opponent, who was meant to be a stepping stone to bigger fights for Cloud, was Gabriel Campillo, who had gone the distance with some tough fighters and was known to have good boxing skill sets but he was not expected by most boxing insiders to be able to handle the power of Tavoris Cloud.
Early in the fight the predictions of the majority of the boxing media seemed to be coming to reality when Cloud knocked Campillo down with a straight right hand and then later in the round was launching a sustained and furious attack along the ropes and it appeared as if the referee was going to stop the fight but instead he had a split second change of mind and called a second knock down because Campillo was being held up by the ropes.
What happened next no one would have expected, over the next couple of rounds Campillo concentrated on moving and occasionally jabbing, gathering himself and getting himself back into the fight. Then the fight totally reversed Campillo over the rest of the fight would circle a way to his right constantly moving offering cloud no chance to get set then would step in and through fierce multiply punch combinations to the body and head, doing something that many of us had not seen before, Cloud being forced onto the back foot afraid of coming forward because of the speed and accuracy of Campillo combinations.
The movement, accuracy and Camillo’s sporadic combinations were giving Cloud a world of problems and he appeared to have no answer, apart from the first 10/7 round, on my score card I gave Cloud 2 clear rounds, so even though by that rationale the fight would be close, I had Campillo running away with the fight and winning at by a round 7 rounds to 5 eg. 1/16 to 1/14 score card.
You could offer excuses to one of the judges who had it close but the judge who had a 1/16 to 1/10 score card Cloud’s way is staggering, if I didn’t know any better I would say that judge was most likely watching Star Wars on Blu ray on a laptop at ring side rather than watching the fight, that score card is staggering.
Over the past several months the boxing world has had extremely controversial decisions in Williams Vs Lara, Pacquaio / Marquez 3 and now this fight.
It is clear to almost everyone who won this fight and the fact that a belt gets taken away because of possible corrupt / incompetent judging decisions leaves a sour taste in everyone’s mouth, the boxing world can deal with controversial / close decisions, what they cannot deal with is clearly incompetent ones which happens way to often in the sport of boxing.
I believe there should be an elite panel formed separately away from the boxing commissions to decide which judges are assigned to which fights and which judges will be appointed to the elite panel, I also believe a similar panel should be formed in relation to referee’s, this is to make sure we have the best officials officiating in the most important fights, to reduce the chances of extremely incorrect officiating.
Although Paul Williams bounced back to what appeared to be a dominating victory against Nobuhiro Ishida, he appeared to me to have made no significant technical improvements what so ever, his left hand was still slow looping and wide and again left to many counter punching opportunities for a straight right hand, which did land, but Ishida did not have the power to knock him out, and Williams was robotically coming forward all night giving very little variety of angles.
The bottom line is any top line fighter in the 147lb division would knock out Paul Williams as long as they had some power, and in my opinion he is defiantly done as a top line fighter and Cloud is not the fighter he was built up to be and fighters like Hopkins and Dawson may come after him now because of the technical floors he clearly posses, Clouds now hangover Cloud and Williams the question remains will the rain fall or will the clouds disappear.