Ishe Smith v Carlos Molina

In a turgid and unexciting battle highlighted by the vocal chords of Jay Nady, Carlos Molina (22-5-2, 6) claimed the IBF Light Middleweight title defeating Ishe Smith (25-6, 11)

The first of 3 title fights on "The One" was marked out as "the one to send fans to sleep" and unfortunately it lived up to that idea.

Surprisingly the fight started brightly with Molina being an aggressive front foot fighter throwing lots of shots with Smith trying to counter things with his left hook. Unfortunately Smith's shots were rarely landing in the early portion and Molina, for all his good work, was unable  too land too much clean past the intelligent defense of Smith.

After clearly taking the first 4 rounds Molina's work become scrappier and in fact he started to recieve persistent warnings from the referee who was warning him for leading with the head on a regular basis. The warnings seemed to kill off Molina's work somewhat whilst Smith continued to make the bout ugly. The ugly rounds, which started in rounds 5 or 6, become a consistent which lacked any sort of clean work. Interestingly the ugliness of these rounds seemed to suit Smith who was able to land the few eye catching shots whilst Molina threw a lot but landed little.

By the time we'd reached the championship rounds it was fair to say fan interested in the contest had died. The rounds through the middle had been close but uninteresting. They'd been close due to how awful and messy they'd been and unfortunately they'd completely killed any entertainment value any fans had. In fact it was probably fair to say that fans were using the bout as a toilet break by this point.

With the bout in the balance the two men finally came alive with some clean work in the championship rounds.

The 11th round saw Smith having by far his best round before Molina came back in the final round, clearly winning that one.

With the middle rounds so difficult to score it was no shock to see a split decision rendered with 2 of the judges feeling Molina's work deserved to take the decision in what was a fair decision given the work he put in compared to Smith's lazy and lethargic effort.

If you missed this one, don't bother trying to catch it!