Sutherland awaits tale of the tape after shock defeat

IRISH boxing officials were yesterday mulling over the shock defeat of Darren Sutherland at the World Championships in Chicago, where their favourite for Olympic qualification went out to Alfonso Blanco (Venezuela) at the wrong end of a shock 20-13 decision.

While high performance director, Garry Keegan admitted that the Dublin middleweight boxed below his potential, his backroom team were looking for a recording of the fight to see exactly where the scores against him came from.

Blanco got off to a three-point start in the opening seconds and that pattern continued as the judges scored hits from punches that appeared to have landed on Sutherland’s arms.

The Venezuelan was three points up before he was rocked by a left jab that gave Sutherland his first computer point. As in his first fight, the Venezuelan was throwing his long right hand from far out and catching Sutherland on the side of the head but Sutherland took most of the punches on his arms and had his hands held high. Still the judges were impressed and scored the round 10-4 in favour of Blanco.

The Venezuelan was 14-5 up when Sutherland caught him with a smashing right hook on top of the head that had him reeling. It was solid enough to warrant a count but the referee ignored it and the judges awarded one of just two points to Sutherland in the second round, which Blanco won 5-2.

Sutherland was now chasing the fight, hunting his opponent down and throwing bombs from in close in an attempt nail Blanco. All the time Blanco was catching him with long shots.

“None of his punches were really clean,” Sutherland insisted. “He may have caught me with one clean shot in the whole contest but that was it. My hands were up. Some of the punches were barely scraping through but the judges were giving them to him.”

Sutherland and performance analyst, Alan Swanton, performance director Gary Keegan and his coaches, Billy Walsh and Zaur Antia were analysing the contest within hours of if finishing. But yesterday morning they were awaiting the recording of the fight from AIBA after the performance analysts from Ireland were not allowed to film the contests.

Apparently the decision was taken after a film of a fight appeared on eBay and the TV company with sole rights to the championships called for a total ban on the use of video recorders in the pavilion.

“The unfortunate thing is the AIBA film of the fight is in a different format to ours so we will have to try and get it converted,” Gary Keegan said.

While Sutherland can now turn his attention to the European qualifiers in the spring, it appears as if John Sweeney won’t be involved as all seven European places in the heavyweight division have been filled following Tuesday night’s programme.

The young Donegal heavyweight went the distance but lost 28-5 to the world No 1, Rakhim Chakhkeiv

“I am happy enough with the performance,” Sweeney said. “I think I was getting a bit too close at times. If I stayed out of trouble and had thrown my punches from a distance I might have been better off. I was a kind of falling on top of him at times.”

With the exception of the Hungarian fans packed into the right hand corner of the pavilion, everyone booed the decision awarded to Joszsef Daniel Darmos over a gallant Swede, Babacar Kamara, who beat the Hungarian everywhere except on the computer.

The Swede won’t go to the qualifiers either and neither will Stephen Simmons from Scotland, who was caught by Milorad Gajovic (Montenegro) in the final round when he appeared to have the contest wrapped up.