Unbeaten Irish-Australian fighter TJ Doheny is your new IBF super bantamweight titleholder after a close fight in Japan. Some saw some controversy in the decision, but the belt is now his regardless.
TJ Doheny (20-0, 14 KOs) didn’t impress like I thought he might this morning in Japan, but he walked away the new IBF Super Bantamweight titleholder nonetheless after taking a narrow split decision over Ryosuke Iwasa (25-3, 16 KOs). Given that it was a close fight in Japan and many thought Iwasa legitimately won, the decision was met with some surprise. It even seemed to surprise Doheny a bit, though I’d wager it was the language barrier as much as anything that had the Irish-Australian confused. I didn’t have a huge problem with the scores though. In fact, I actually scored the fight a draw.
The opening couple rounds were strong ones for Iwasa. He opened up two separate cuts that would bother his challenger the rest of the way in the first two rounds even. TJ was a bit more active, however, and counter intuitively had the far better jab despite being at a reach disadvantage. Really the fight boiled down to the fact that Doheny was consistently doing more work while the defending titleholder was doing the more damaging work, just less often. The punch stats showed this in the end too. I thought the soon to be new titleholder controlled most of the middle of the fight after his rough, bloody start, but he tired and Iwasa was beating him up a bit in the last few rounds. Both men were too tired to do much of consequence in the twelfth though.
ESPN+ was somewhat surprisingly brought this fight by its usual international curator in Top Rank. I didn’t see this coming, but apparently they now have some promotional rights to Isaac Dogboe and want him to unify with the winner next year. I don’t think they saw anything hre that would discourage them either. I’ve viewed Iwasa as a weak titleholder for his reign ripe for the picking and TJ Doheny as a solid prospect coming out of Australia, but that potential mismatch isn’t what played out here. Is Iwasa better than I gave him credit for or Doheny worse? It is probably a little from column A and a little from column B, but I don’t think Dogboe has much to worry about either way given the Ghanaian’s talent and intensity level.
