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Sergio Mora was in awe of IBF junior middleweight champion Bakhram Murtazaliev last weekend, saying he reminded him of the great Alexis Arguello with how he looked destroying former WBO champion Tim Tszyu in three rounds at the Caribe Royale Resort in Orlando, Florida.
Murtazaliev’s Precise Punches
Commentator Mora says he realized in the first minute and twenty seconds of the fight that Tszyu was in trouble because Murtazaliev looked Arguello-esque, throwing short punches with accuracy. Tszyu made things easier for Murtazaliev by going right at him and trying to have a war, but he got destroyed.
Murtazaliev (23-0, 17 KOs) came into the fight with a broken knuckle on his right hand, which is normally the main weapon in his arsenal. He adjusted well to the injury, using his left hook to repeatedly droop Tszyu (24-2, 17 KOs) to the canvas in a four-knockdown performance.
Mora feels it was bad matchmaking on Tszyu’s team’s part to choose to match him against the powerful Murtazaliev in his first fight after he suffered his first career defeat against the 6’6″ Sebastian Fundora on March 30th. He feels that Tszyu should have been given a confidence booster instead.
“In the first minute of the first round, I realize that this man is going to give problems to Tim Tszyu,” said Sergio Mora to the Chris Mannix YouTube channel, talking about Bakhram Murtazaliev’s destruction of Tim Tszyu last weekend.
“It only took me one minute and twenty seconds to realize this guy was going to be a headache. He had a laser-like right hand, the uppercut, and the hook, which he ended up dropping. He reminded me in the first minute when he missed that right hand, and he threw a left hook like an Alexis Arguello.”
Murtazaliev wasn’t using his right hand a lot in the fight. Most of the big punches that he landed were with his left hook, and it was almost like he was fighting with just one arm.
“They’re laser-like, don’t waste no space, and the technique is perfect. It’s not speed that gets you; it’s not power that gets you. It’s time and accuracy. That’s what I saw with Murtazaliev when he missed that first right hand, and then he threw that left hook and caught up with that right uppercut,” said Mora.
It was surprising to see how well Murtazaliev fought in close quarters because taller fighters normally need a lot of room to generate power on their punches. That wasn’t the case with Murtazaliev. He seemed to be punching harder in close than he did from the outside, and that was weird but devasting.
“I said, ‘This man is going to be trouble.’ Even though they weren’t landing cleanly, it was going to be a long night for Tim Tszyu. It ended up being a short night because it ended up being a three-round war that he was at the end of, but bad matchmaking because you go from a 6’6″ southpaw to an unknown, strong, undefeated Russian title holder,” said Mora.
Tszyu looked like he hadn’t done any research on Murtazaliev’s past fights to know what he was getting himself into by fighting this guy. If he had looked at his recent victory over Jack Culcay, he would have rejected him as an opponent.
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