7 years ago today: Dmitry Mikhailovich Kucher vs. Junior Ilunga Makabu

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Nice young ranked cruiser brawl.

Junior was (perhaps surprisingly, in hindsight) a 2/1 underdog and the yet-to-ever-taste-defeat Ukrainian was then seen as having a pretty high ceiling, which makes their disparate trajectories since all the more startling. Kucher fought just a handful more times, sporadically, going 3-2-1 across half a decade before calling it quits - while the South African is actually on a career best run at the moment, seven years later, with consecutive victories over Dmitry Kudryashov, Alexander Papin and Michał Cieślak (albeit with controversy in that last one).

 

In fairness, though, latter-days Kucher did give us a candidate for "second most brutal time Maccarinelli got KTFO", behind Frenkel.

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Here's how much a maniacally fastidious Kurosawaesque perfectionist I am:

This wasn't my originally planned thread. In fact, it was a last minute sub for one I'd been planning all day:

7 years ago today: Dermot "Dirty Derry" Mathews vs. Thomas Joshua "Boom Boom" Coyle

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...but while Tommy Coyle's real name was relatively easy to find, I could not for the life of me dig up anything concrete on whether Mathews was born with the given name Derry or whether it was a shortened form of either Diarmuid (the Gaelic name usually Anglicized into Dermot, which would mean the Scouser has Irish roots) or Alexander (which would leave it probable that he's full-blooded English). I shot him a message on Twitter this afternoon and never heard back, but found that there was one other pretty good fight on this date...so, voilà.

 

In the absence of any way of knowing for certain I said "**** it", scrapped it and did something completely different. Very much on-brand for me.