Gennady “GGG” Golovkin picked up his 19th straight knockout victory on Saturday night in Monte Carlo when he defeated Martin Murray by TKO in Round 11. Despite succumbing to Golovkin’s hard shots, Murray said he expected him to hit harder.
"I expected a tough fight and anybody who saw it knows that it was," Murray said. "But to be honest, and I know it might sound a bit daft because I was up and down like a yoyo, I thought he was going to hit a bit harder than he did.”
Murray was knocked down three times during the course of the bout, but he did hold up well to many of Golovkin’s clean shots, and took the WBA and IBO champion further than any other fighter has in his entire career. Murray’s ability to last into Round 11 may have been a blessing for Golovkin’s career.
The Kazakh has been pining for a big-name opponent to face him, particularly WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto. Perhaps Murray’s talk of Golovkin not hurting him as much as expected could strengthen the resolve of the rest of the middleweight division.
"It wasn't so much his punching power, which is strong - don't get me wrong, he hits well - but I was constantly on the back foot and on the ropes. Not through choice, it was just that I couldn't really get any momentum or pressure going forward,” Murray said.
"We knew I was going to spend a lot of time on the ropes and that was one of the tactics that we tried to use - to counter him. But it's quite hard to generate power like that when your back's to the ropes. We did catch him and I had some success when I was in the centre of the ring, but I just couldn't maintain that pressure going forward.”
While Golovkin badly wants to face Cotto, there are a slew of names that would like him as well and all of them pose less of a threat. The loudest of them has been Cornelius “K9” Bundrage, who vowed he would “punish” the future Hall of Famer.
“Yeah I will punish Cotto. He don’t want this work,” Bundrage said. “I will have the junior middleweight belt and I will snatch the middleweight belt. This ain’t Canelo this is Iron Dog K9.”
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