Daniel Óscar García vs. Ivan Yurievich Redkach & Stephen Fulton Jr vs. Arnold Arkadyevich Khegai RBR

Redkach a very strange fish

 

What a **** weekend of fights... I mean most years start off pretty poor but this was dreadful. Have no interest in seeing Garcia or Hurd fight again unless it's them being smacked around the ring.

 

My Stephen Fulton vs Arnold Khegai scorecard (writing live):

R1: 10-9 Fulton
R2: 10-9 Fulton
R3: 10-9 Khegai
R4: 10-9 Khegai
R5: 10-9 Fulton
R6: 10-9 Fulton, close
R7: 10-9 Fulton
R8: 10-9 Fulton
R9: 10-9 Fulton
R10: 10-9 Fulton
R11: 10-9 Khegai
R12: 10-9 Fulton

117-111 Fulton, 116-112 is fine too.

Before I go on about Fulton's attributes, I'd like to say that the ref did a very good job in this fight to keep things fair and entertaining.

Fulton's biggest separator in this fight was his ring generalship. He was very good at keeping off of the ropes and circling away when he was starting to be forced there, usually. This also belies a bit of a weakness however: Fulton is not good on the inside. Khegai isn't exceptionally fast or heavy handed, yet every time he got in, it was very one sided in his favor.
Additionally, it's obvious here that Fulton's footspeed is pretty slow for a 122 elite. He can't move back very quickly, and this combined with his high guard makes him (and made him in this fight) a sitting duck for body shots.
To balance out his slower footspeed, his hands are quite fast. He can onload very quick jabs and occasionally even rights. To some extent, though, he sacrifices power for this speed. When he loads off on his shots, they're clearly a bit harder, and almost just as fast, it's more that he sacrifices consistently hard and fast shots for stamina.
Another issue with those frequent jabs he throws is that he doesn't set them up. Early on, he often wasn't able to land them even vs the basic Khegai because as fast as they were, they had no feints or anything to trip Khegai up. Combined with leaning his head in a lot, this made him occasionally quite a target for Khegai's overhands. If Khegai had better timing or more power, Fulton probably would have been out of there at many points.

Despite me saying that, Fulton showed a pretty good chin. Khegai clearly isn't very powerful (I feel largely due to hesitation on his part) or accurate, but when he did land on Fulton's chin, Fulton took them very well, except for a very brief spell in the 11th. If anything, despite being smaller and having a reputation as a featherfist, Fulton's punches clearly had a bit more of an effect on Khegai than vice versa.

If anything, this fight increased my confidence that Inoue will get an early KO. I don't think Fulton has anything to keep Inoue off of him, or anything to offer Inoue when they're on the inside.