Fuji Terebi: Kai Ishizawa vs. Katsuki Mori RBR

Round 8

Ishizawa ripping the body with hooks, dropping a level and coming in low. Mori hurt, lowering his guard, and Ishizawa straps him with a hook across his temple. Mori badly hurt and getting backed up involuntarily but flurrying at Ishizawa for all he's worth. Ishizawa knows he is close to a breakthrough with Mori looking shaky and just starts to exert his will into an uninterrupted series of two-pieces. Jab/cross, jab/uppercut, jab/loop. Mori finally can take no more and succumbs, waved off after he tumbles onto his carapace, narrowly avoiding his upper spine colliding scarily with the bottom rope.

TKO8!!

 

Mori stretchered out, in tears.

 

Ishizawa improves to 10-1 with nine knockouts...kid's a beast.

Mori came in 9-0 and is Ishizawa's third undefeated scalp after Yuga Inoue (no relation to either Takeshi, nor the clan that includes Takuma, Koki, and of course Naoya himself) and Tatsuro Nakashima - both 7-0-1 as of when they met Ishizawa.

His only professional defeat came to southpaw Masataka Taniguchi, previous wearer of this belt Ishizawa just won. He vacated it to challenge Wilfredo "Bimbito" Méndez for the WBO straw championship...successfully, meaning there is no shame whatsoever in a rookie Ishizawa having dropped a competitive UD8 against Taniguchi just two years on from his debut.

 

Ishizawa is a classic example of a style suited more for the pros than the amateurs, as he has really found a stride now but was victorious in only ⅔ of his matches in the unpaid ranks (going 28-14, losing exactly half as many as he didn't).

 

In lieu of showing anything else from the undercard, Fuji has opted to pad out the rest of the broadcast slot with Murata vs. Brant II ...presumably as early promotion for his rescheduled match with Golovkin in April.

 

Pradabsiri will probably beat Moonsri again, but either way the winner of that one is a notch below their countryman Thammanoon "Knockout CP Freshmart" Niyomtrong - at least when he's on-form. When he lapses into lazy complacent mode all three of them are roughly on a par. I'd give any of Japan's top straws (Taniguchi, either Shigeoka brother, Ishizawa, or Koura) a very decent chance to defeat any of their Siamese counterparts unless we're talking a "switched-on" Niyomtrong in which case he's at least a slight fave over anybody in the division. You also have the Cuarto vs. Taduran rematch winner (not to mention Vic Saludar) representing yet another dominant Asian country at 105lbs in the Philippines...along with the Dominican Republic's fast-tracked star and newly-minted WBA champ Erick Rosa breaking up the homogeny on behalf of the Western hemisphere. A division without a really strong p4p candidate standing out from the pack, but the flip side of that coin is you have a lot of parity among the champs and contenders with compelling match-ups to make by pairing any of the above names.