After waiting so long for him to say something, Artur Beterbiev then suddenly said too much, reminding us all that the blessing and curse of a man of few words is that their few words carry great meaning.
Intoxicated, it seemed, by the high of victory, the Russian light-heavyweight’s guard was down, his inhibitions had been lowered, and the cards he had all week kept close to his chest were now thrown on the table. “I did not good today,” he said to start. “I wanted more quality. I don’t know why. I didn’t like this fight. But I’ll be better one day.” He then added: “Of course it was a tough fight. Dmitry is a world champion too. He has good skills, better than me, but today Allah chose me.”
Chosen or not, Beterbiev’s victory in Riyadh last night (October 12) was ultimately decided by two ringside judges, both of whom voted in his favour (115-113, 116-112) after 12 rounds in the company of Dmitry Bivol, his fellow Russian. (The third one couldn’t split them, posting a score of 114-114.)
These scores came as a result of what the judges witnessed Beterbiev do in the ring with his hands and his aggression, yet all three, despite their vantage point, failed to capture either the flow of the fight or the story told by Beterbiev’s body language throughout. If, for instance, it wasn’t clear why he was being told by his corner between rounds six and seven, “You’re not tired, Artur, nobody can beat you,” it should have been patently obvious why his corner felt the need to implore him to go for the knockout in the championship rounds. After all, up to that point Beterbiev had struggled making an impression on Bivol, hence why he didn’t like the fight, and he had been forced to come to terms with not only the possibility of going the distance for the first time as a professional, but perhaps even losing. He had, through 10 rounds, done far more chasing than hurting. He no longer seemed like the old machine; almost human, in fact. In round seven, having eaten a Bivol right, the machine even smiled, nodded his head. It was a glitch, a sign of respect.
This continued after the fight, too, when Beterbiev was honest in a way that pride typically precludes. For if it is true that he was disappointed with the fight and his performance, as stated, one starts to wonder how on earth it was possible for Beterbiev to win a high-level fight like this and beat a man in Bivol who appeared to be boxing the fight of his life. The two things, in this scenario, don’t really go together. Either Beterbiev won because he was brilliant and even better than Bivol, or he lost because he couldn’t quite perform to the high standards of old; his high standards. It is hard, given what transpired, to make a case for these two conflicting notions marrying and adequately summarising what happened last night. It is just as hard, personally speaking, to make a case for Beterbiev winning enough of the rounds to win the fight.
From the outset Bivol, now 23-1 (12), just seemed more comfortable, settled. He moved with intelligence, he jabbed with purpose, and he appeared to enjoy the relative serenity of surroundings conducive to concentrating on a game plan and then executing it. This was a boxer’s crowd, more so than a puncher’s crowd, and within the eerie silence of the Kingdom Arena Bivol was able to stay calm, measured, and focus only on the punches he needed to throw and the ones he needed to avoid.
Beterbiev, on the other hand, this thrash metal light-heavyweight, could probably have done with a bit more noise. A bit more chaos. A bit more passion. Without it, he was at risk of being lulled to sleep or simply falling behind.
Indeed, though often reminded of Beterbiev’s propensity to start slow, this could only be relevant as an excuse for so long and it was hard to give him much in the opening three rounds. His first big shot, a right hand, arrived in the dying seconds of round one during an exchange, but until then he had been largely out-jabbed by Bivol and frustrated by his movement. The same was true in round two, an even better round for Bivol. In this round Bivol would move one way, then the other, never giving Beterbiev the chance to set. He also made sure to threaten, and frequently throw, the right hand, not wanting Beterbiev to think he was scared to use it or reliant only on his jab. This, in turn, caused some hesitation in Beterbiev, a fighter accustomed to throwing whenever and whatever he wants.
In round three, a lovely one-two from Bivol set the tone, as it did in the two previous rounds, and there looked to be a lot more variety to his work. He would follow punches with punches whereas Beterbiev would just follow, occasionally firing his right hand. He threw this shot upstairs, in an effort to penetrate Bivol’s high-held guard, and also downstairs, at his body, which of the two was the more fruitful venture. Whether thrown to head or body, though, only ever was it in isolation and already Beterbiev needed more; more punches, more urgency.
In the next round, the fourth, this feeling was solidified when Beterbiev became more active and more intent on cutting off the ring. This period of success continued in the fifth, too, when he landed a vicious right to Bivol’s body and reacted to Bivol trying to take the centre of the ring by pushing him around and returning him to where Beterbiev wanted him and where, in his eyes, he belonged.
Even so, Bivol was not without success of his own in the fifth. A reverse one-two, for example, that is, a right cross followed by a jab, cracked Beterbiev on the way in and was the highlight of the round. He pulled off a similar trick later on as well, only this time switching the jab for a hook, and Beterbiev, as before, saw neither punch coming.
Rather than cameos, or eye-catching shots designed to deceive, these bursts from Bivol were always punctuating rounds of success. It was not, in other words, an attempt to steal a round, or trick the judges, but instead an attempt to assert his dominance and demonstrate it with spurts of activity Beterbiev was yet to produce himself. This was maybe best exemplified in the sixth, a round in which Bivol was made to work hard by Beterbiev but still showed good defence and still threw enough back to outwork Beterbiev. “You’re not tired, Artur,” he was then told in the corner before the seventh. “Nobody can beat you.”
After that came the nod of respect following a Bivol right hand and it looked at that point as though Bivol was on his way to fashioning something special. He even hurt Beterbiev with a left hook thrown at the end of a combination, whereupon he let his excitement get the better of him and probably threw too many subsequent shots in pursuit of an unlikely finish. This, of course, gave Beterbiev the chance to find something big of his own, which he inevitably did, causing Bivol to cover up as the round drew to a close.
The next two rounds, the eighth and ninth, were quieter, with the eighth exploding only when it was about to end and the ninth another round in which Bivol managed his energy well and smartly picked his moments to punch. There was not much between them, in truth, but still it was difficult to watch what was happening and not see Bivol as the one dictating the pace, the flow, and deciding both when and what he would throw.
If you could feel this watching it, no doubt Beterbiev, the only one capable of changing it, felt it, too, hence why he was busier and more aggressive in round 10 and why his corner team were increasingly frantic during and between rounds. Yet even in the 10th, a round he needed to win, Beterbiev’s aggression was still met with smart counterpunches from Bivol, with one right-left combination of particular note in that round.
In fact, it was only from round 11 that Bivol’s composure and poise betrayed him and Beterbiev’s desperation became more of a weapon. By then Bivol, so clean for so long, was marked up, visibly weakened. He struggled to keep Beterbiev away and he struggled to get a hold of him each time he was hurt. His own punches, meanwhile, became those of the arm variety and this change, a subtle change in the level of threat, granted Beterbiev the luxury of walking in unopposed. When in range, he now worked the body and he manhandled Bivol. He tried to condense a fight’s worth of punishment into three minutes, perhaps worried he had left it too late.
Bivol, though, survived. He then regrouped and did more than survive in round 12, another round Beterbiev attacked like a man requiring a knockout, even finding the odd flurry to keep Beterbiev in check and not give him complete freedom of both the ring and his body. Each flurry now thrown by Bivol was a reminder. It was a reminder of how this thing had started and a reminder of Beterbiev’s inability to do much about it. For once, his power couldn’t turn the tide of a fight. For once, it wasn’t enough to end it.
“Did you feel like you were slowing him with your power as the fight went on?” he was asked in the ring afterwards.
“No,” said Beterbiev, now 21-0 (20). “Because I was not delivering one punch.”
“When the final bell rang, did you think you did enough to win the fight?”
“Yes, but for me it’s uncomfortable because usually I’m not waiting for the (final) bell. But today I’m even lucky too.”
“Your corner, before the 10th round, said to you, ‘You need to knock him out.’ Were you surprised to hear that?”
“They always say that,” said Beterbiev, laughing.
“Did that make you any more aggressive going into those final two rounds?”
“More focused, not aggressive.”
If it was true that corner motivation had made him more focused in the final two rounds, it could also be argued that a controversial victory had made Artur Beterbiev more talkative, open, honest. Suddenly, having said nothing all week, here he was saying a lot, maybe too much. Or maybe what he said in the ring after the fight is open to interpretation, like a fight, and was, like three judges’ scorecards, lost in translation.
Read the full article here
