It didn’t look like a competitive matchup on paper and it wasn’t in the ring. Olympic gold medalist and secondary middleweight titleholder Ryota Murata defeated Emanuele Blandamura by eighth round stoppage this morning in Japan. Everything fell apart for Daigo Higa in the co-main event though. He first lost his title on the scale and then was upset by Cristofer Rosales in the ring.
Emanuele Blandamura (27-3, 5 KOs) probably won the first round on his movement while hitting Ryota Murata’s (14-1, 11 KOs) guard as I don’t think the popular Japanese fighter touched his Italian foe more than once or twice, but Murata got his body work going in the second. It was still slow thanks to Blandamura’s borderline running, but he got through a bit. The secondary titleholder was more effective in the third behind a pair of nice right hands that I didn’t see Blandamura taking all that well.
Murata’s intensity picked up a bit in a solid fourth, but things slowed back down in the fifth. Blandamura is not an appealing fighter to watch. The exercise became increasingly pointless in the sixth round when the Japanese star once again upped his rate of attack. Blandamura was hurt a little in this round and for the first time got beat up bell to bell. I briefly wondered if he was even going to get out of the sixth at multiple points in the round.
He didn’t get the stoppage then or in the seventh, but it instead came late in the eighth round on a big right hand along the ropes. In the preview for this fight I proposed that the only real interesting question would be whether or not Emanuele Blandamura could be stopped in the eighth round for the third time in his three step up fights. The answer to that question is yes. The Italian probably could have continued, but I was glad he wasn’t allowed to so I could stop watching this tedious nonsense.
Ryota Murata is a solid, strong middleweight. He brings great pressure, especially when he remembers his jab, and seems to get stronger as the fight goes on. I don’t know what really that could do against a Golovkin, Canelo, or Jacobs, but I wouldn’t mind seeing it. Billy Joe Saunders would be a fascinating and classic bull versus matador matchup. I don’t think we’ll necessarily see it though as it won’t make much financial sense for the man who can stay home and make just as much with easier fights. A defense with in house Top Rank fighter Esquiva Falcao seems to be in the cards next. The two met in the London gold medal match in a fight in which Murata only won because of a controversial two point deduction from Falcao. That is certainly a money fight in Japan.
There is also a big upset to report from the pre-ESPN undercard. Rising Japanese flyweight star Daigo Higa (15-1, 15 KOs) was pulled from what should have been a WBC title defense against Cristofer Rosales (27-3, 18 KOs) after nine rounds. I say should have been because Higa missed weight for the fight by two pounds and lost the title before he even lost this fight. Reportedly this was a fun war in which Daigo Higa just didn’t have the energy to keep up. Cristofer Rosales made sure to take full advantage to win the WBC belt. I’ll report again if I see anything different when the fight becomes available for me to watch, but this sounds like a textbook example of a weight cut gone wrong. There was talk before the fight that Higa didn’t physically look good, he missed weight extremely badly for a flyweight, and then gassed out before the twelve round distance. He probably shouldn’t have been in there at all. Hopefully he recovers from this and makes a nice run at super flyweight as the 22 year old is a talented and excited fighter.
