Delvin Rodriguez looked like a dog’s breakfast on ESPN’s Friday Night Fights, but he did deserve to beat Joachim Alcine. Instead, he got one of those special Montreal-flavoured draws. It wasn’t a particularly high level junior middleweight fight and it wasn’t all that enjoyable, but that doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t have been fair scoring. Rodriguez was more active and accurate throughout (relatively speaking, anyway).
The 1st, as it so often is, was a feeling-out round. Rodriguez slipped a predictable jab from Alcine and tattooed him with a right to steal it. Things heated up a little in the 2nd (again, relatively speaking), with Rodriguez cornering his man for a while before eating a straight right hand of his own. From then on it settled into a pattern, with Alcine failing to take advantage of his reach advantage or make Rodriguez pay for reaching, while consistently smothering his own best work by falling in.
For a while it looked like perhaps Alcine was slowing Rodriguez down with his splayed-legged jab and occasional thumping left hand to the body, but it soon became apparent that Rodriguez just looks permanently slowed down now. Still, he’d done enough to win by the final bell and looked rightly disappointed by the draw by scores of 97-93, 96-94 and 95-95. It’s hard to see where either man goes from here. If anything, this fight seemed to prove that neither is even up to FNF level anymore. If they’re going to be gatekeepers, it’ll be at a low level.
On the undercard, heavyweight Derric Rossy upset Joe Hanks via a 10 round majority decision. While the fight wasn’t broadcast Down Under, there was some talk that one of the scorecards (95-95) was “controversial.”
Rabies watch: Teddy Atlas was surprisingly (and disappointingly) subdued when the lousy decision was rendered in the main event, but did provide some excellent unintentional comedy when he excitedly described Alcine as “begging to be dominated.”
