Israil Madrimov says he wants a rematch against Terence Crawford to have the opportunity to recapture his WBA junior middleweight title from their narrow 12-round clash earlier this month on August 3rd.
The judges scored it 115-112, 116-112 and 115-112. It was close.
Madrimov, 29, landed the cleaner, harder shots throughout the fight and looked like he’d done more than enough to win. However, the judges gave it to the more popular fighter, Crawford (41-0, 31 KOs), based on the jabs he was landing. That’s pretty much all Crawford did in the fight throw jabs.
A Close Contest with Questionable Scoring
“I was a world champion, and I deserved to be a world champion after August 3; now, my main goal is to regain that status,” said Madrimov.
It isn’t likely that Madrimov will ever get a chance to fight Crawford, 36, again because he’s fixated on fighting Canelo Alvarez at 168If Crawford can’t get that fight, he may retire unless His Excellency Turki Alalshikh offers him a treasure chamber filled with gold to fight one of the 154-pounders.
The August 3rd Crawford-Madrimov card reportedly failed to bring in many PPV buys on DAZN, and there were many empty seats on the night of the fight. It’s clear that Crawford isn’t a draw and needs a popular fighter to hitch a ride on their coattails as we saw when he fought Errol Spence last year.
“I said after the fight that I thought I did enough to keep my World Championship Belt,” said the 29-year-old Uzbek native. “Right now, I’m ready for a rematch with Crawford to regain my title or to challenge any of the other junior middleweight champions.”
“A rematch with Terence Crawford is my goal, but I’m not sure he is interested right now. Our fight still has left many questions unanswered,” said Madrimov.
The punishment that Madrimov dished out to Crawford will make it highly unlikely the Nebraska native will ever fight him again or face any of the talented 154-pounders. Madrimov’s best bet to become world champion again at junior middleweight is to fight Sebastian Fundora or Bakhram Murtazaliev.
If you’re Turki, it would only make sense to offer Crawford a ton of money if it were against someone that he would be the underdog, like Jaron ‘Boots’ Ennis, David Benavidez, Artur Beterbiev or Dmitry Bivol. Paying Crawford a lot of money to watch him jab and fight cautiously isn’t worth it. Turki needs to lure Crawford some into fighting one of the above killers to put him in a situation where he’ll need to slug to keep from getting knocked out.
The former WBA 154-lb champion Madrimov (10-1-1, 7 KOs) feels he deserved to win that clash at the BMO Stadium in Los Angeles.
