I think Ash is in danger of not fulfilling his potential. He is slick , nice skills, very fit etc. But spends too much of his time sparring for other guys in their quest to titles. Olusegun, McCloskey and Salita all have used him in the last 12 months. I have not seen last nights fight yet, but have recently got the impression Ash is not putting his foot to the floor in fights and going for it. As someone said about last nights fight, he does enough to be competitive without winning the rounds. That may end up being the epitaph for his career , i feel right now he could go in with anyone and give a good account of himself, but he needs to get some real devil in his performances and some direction with his career. Get himself a fan base at home would be a start.
At the end when they showed the stats, Tessitore said something like "Rodriguez dominated with the jab" despite the fact they had hit landed pretty much the same amount-just Delvin had thrown a hundred or so more that missed. atsch It was a pretty good edition of Friday Night Fights-that 'KO' after the bell in the undercard fight was brutal. But congratulations to Ashley, I thought he lost 96-94, but people need to get in their heads that losing a close fight isn't a robbery *cough* Froch Dirrell/Kessler *cough* I wish him all the best and hope he gets some recognition over here.
I thought Rodriguez won it by a couple of rounds, but hey, I'm not going to begrudge Theophane a victory And what a victory, Rodriguez is a borderline World class fighter.
He doesn't get much fanfare as he established himself in the States. I hope we'll all get behind him now.
This "win" is nothing to be proud of for Theophane. My scorecard read 98-92 for Rodriguez, and most objective viewers had it around the same (97-93 was the most common). He is morally obligated to grant a rematch, and if he doesn't he's one of boxing's royal pieces of ****. Before anyone suggests it, no - my scorecard has nothing to do with what was being said by Teddy Atlas, as we frequently disagree. He had it narrower than I did. Theophane did slip a lot and Rodriguez was clearly gassing in the last few rounds, but the vastly cleaner work in the overwhelming majority of them was done by Rodriguez. Theophane's sloppy offense earned him only the 8th and the 10th, where Rodriguez basically ceded ground and threw blind jabs and inside arm punches.
Read the rest of my post. And don't ever ****ing accuse me of being influenced by the commentators again. Thanks.
The compubox numbers out on the scene showed Rodriguez landed more in every single round. Pretty decieving as he was wobbling like a jelly in that last and had nothing in his shots.
Those stats they displayed also claim he missed over 86% of his jabs. That he threw close to 500 seems about right. He certainly did miss quite a few, but my guess is that it's closer to 50%. Someone in my RBR thread suggested that it's because while a lot of the jabs made contact most hit Ashley's arms. In the context of the 1-2 alone, however, he landed enough jabs on the face of Theophane for it to be more than 13.whatever%.
Closer to half than to thirteen percent is what I said, and what I meant. I wasn't marking down each individual one. It just strikes me that whoever did perform this task for ESPN missed a good number. When he was pumping the jab by itself a lot of them were just range-finders and/or slipped by Theophane. When he threw the 1-2 both the jab and the right hand were landing in succession. This happened enough times that 13% seems highly unlikely.
My point is that my opinion is mine - not that of Teddy Atlas. I was performing the RBR in the General Forum, and therefore my focus was 100% on the visual stimuli at hand. I write what I see, and analyze it on the spot using my own criteria. The commentary is just background noise and does not influence me in the least. Even if I were that impressionable, concentrating on describing the action in explicit detail doesn't leave enough time during the round to be tilted by the narration. I'm a pretty laid back guy (for the most part) but questioning the integrity of my RBR methodology is one thing I won't abide, and will get quite pissy about. :yep