Canelo Álvarez vs. Gennady Golovkin & Why Adalaide Byrd’s scorecard wasn’t that bad

If you’re a passionate boxing fan chances are when you watched the Canelo Álvarez vs. Gennady Golovkin fight Adalaide Byrd’s score card probably didn’t make much sense to you. However if you’ve watched most of Gennady Golovkin’s fights and you looked at his fight against Canelo and removed your biased you might see things a wee bit differently. It’s important to know that September 16, 2017 wasn’t the first time Adalaide Byrd judged a Triple G fight. It’s also not the first time she judged a Canelo fight.

Golovkin vs Dominic Wade – Adalaide Byrd judged this fight

One thing that was abundantly clear watching Canelo Álvarez vs. Gennady Golovkin was that GGG didn’t fight the same time of fight we’re used to seeing him fight. Which is odd when you think about it, being that Canelo Álvarez in many was is clearly the smaller man. Canelo Álvarez in reality is a blown up middle weight 154 is where Canelo Álvarez belongs and had it not been for his talent and obvious star power that’s where he probably would have stayed.
GGG vs. Willie Monroe Jr – Adalaide Byrd also judged this fight

Gennady Golovkin hasn’t moved up in weight, Gennady Golovkin is a middleweight and will go down in history as one of the best middleweights of all time so why then wasn’t Gennady Golovkin able to walk Canelo Álvarez down and dominate him? Canelo Álvarez vs. Gennady Golovkin was a game of skill and GGG has a history of cutting off the ring and destroying his opponent when he feels like it. The Canelo vs. Golovkin fight was the first time I had ever seen Triple G so tentative, When Kell Brook moved up to fight Triple G he was destroyed, GGG dominated Brook and let Brook know, no matter how much skilled Brook had been at Welterweight he was no match for Triple G at Middleweight.

Watch below as GGG decides when Kell Brook should fight

Why then did Gennady Golovkin allow Canelo to fight when Canelo felt like fighting?

If you rewatch the fight it’s abundantly clear that Canelo Álvarez fought when he felt like fighting, you could see and hear the moans and groans of the crowd when this happened, but the truth of the matter is that it did happen. If you’re a judge that’s watched and judge GGG fights in the past it would be easy to see that Triple G was having a hard time fighting the smaller guy. In past fights if GGG felt that a fighter was not on the same level, Triple G would take over the fight cut off the ring and maul his opponent. Triple G did this to short opponents, tall opponents, you come up to middleweight it was a problem, chances are GGG was going to knock you down or knock you out. Yet in this fight no such threat existed, Not one time did it appear that Canelo Álvarez was in any serious trouble. Not one time did it seem like Canelo was even bothered by Triple G’s power. The question you should ask is why? It’s because GGG was unable to throw all of his power into an puch because of Canelos skill. So based on how you as a judge score a fight you could come up with a lopsided victory for Canelo

This doesn’t justify Adalaide Byrd’s scorecard however it gives some reasoning into why she may have judged the fight the way she did. None of us had ever seen this side of GGG before. Which gives her decision making some validity in my opinion. What was my score card. I had Canelo winning by 2 rounds, however it wouldn’t bother me if someone else had Triple G winning by 1 – 3 rounds.

For Canelo Álvarez vs. Gennady Golovkin 2 I have Canelo winning easily. Clearly Canelo has more skill than Triple G, what we don’t know is if Triple G can catch Canelo with a nice clean shot.