Well that wasn’t supposed to happen. Trailing on the scorecards, usually relatively light hitting Colombian contender Eleider Alvarez put Sergey Kovalev down three times in the seventh round for a big and shocking finish. Dmitry Bivol won on the undercard as well.
Eleider Alvarez (24-0, 12 KOs) looked good for two rounds in this fight. The opening frame was the first and less emphatic of the two. The Montreal based Colombian moved well and found his straight right hand several times through Sergey Kovalev’s (32-3-1, 28 KOs) increasingly leaky defense. The 35 year old Russian correct course in the second round, however, and he began to apply his trademark technical and powerful pressure. From there until the final round, he was firmly in control of the fight. Rounds two through six were a sweep on most scorecards, including my own.
In fact, in the sixth round it seemed pretty clear that the fight was heading in the expected direction. Kovalev landed his best shot of the fight early in the round and spent the rest of the time remaining swarming Alvarez. The shots were fading in power as the round went on as Sergey was probably a bit too active, but it was pretty dominant stuff. It didn’t matter though. Maybe coming out for the seventh tired, Kovalev got nailed right down the middle with a huge right hand. He went down immediately. When he first rose, he didn’t look that hurt to me. Even on replays now it is hard to tell how hurt he was from the one shot, but he did go on the retreat. Against the ropes he was blasted with several even bigger blows that dropped him again, this time clearly badly hurt. Once again the Russian former great beat the count, probably rising too quickly, but at this point the writing was on the wall. It didn’t take much to send him back down for the finish.
Post-fight an understandably elated Eleider Alvarez and his team celebrated while Kovalev seemed to blame having had too long of a camp for the loss. It is always something with this guy, but never him or his opponent.
Young light heavyweight titleholder Dmitry Bivol (14-0, 9 KOs) had the unenviable task of looking good against tough South African out Isaac Chilemba (25-6-2, 10 KOs) and didn’t really pull it off. I wasn’t surprised. Bivol very clearly won the fight, even getting two shut out scores in his favor from the official judges, but from the fourth round on it was a struggle to get clean work to land. If the goal here was to hype a matchup between Bivol and the main event’s winner, maybe it would have been wise to put him in with someone else. The HBO commentary team was disappointed that Dmitry didn’t put on a showy performance, but this is basically what I expected. It is all Chilemba will let you do.
