Erislandy Lara vs Terrell Gausha

Erislandy Lara retained his WBA super welterweight title with a unanimous decision over Terrell Gausha on 14 October 2017 at Barclays Center in Brooklyn. The Cuban southpaw, aged 34, faced an unbeaten challenger and former United States Olympian in the main event of a three-title card attended by 7,643. Lara established the distance early. He touched Gausha with his right jab, including jabs to the body, and looked for the straight left when Gausha came forward. The challenger spent much of the opening two rounds probing without finding a way past him. By the third, Lara’s left hand was the clearer scoring punch, and the crowd had begun to show its impatience with the limited exchanges.

The decisive incident came in the fourth. As Gausha advanced in a crouch, Lara caught him with a short right and followed with a left to the chin. Gausha fell to a seated position, rose promptly during referee Charlie Fitch’s count and did not appear badly hurt. Lara made no sustained attempt to finish him. Gausha landed a straight right before the round ended, but the knockdown had increased a lead Lara already held through his more accurate work.

Gausha had his best spell in the fifth. He pressed Lara towards the ropes, threw with both hands and reached the body with hooks. He could not keep up that pressure in the sixth, when he again stood at a range that suited the champion. Gausha made another effort in the seventh, getting Lara near the ropes and landing a short right that briefly put him off balance. Lara recovered at once. The eighth brought more exchanges than the earlier rounds, but Lara’s left hands were generally the cleaner blows as Gausha lunged in with hooks.

The challenger remained well behind entering the final four rounds. He did a little more in a quiet ninth, then began the tenth with some urgency, but Lara resumed finding gaps for his straight left. Gausha gave ground in the eleventh and had even less success reaching the champion. In the last round, he rushed forward without setting his attacks up, allowing Lara to keep his distance and score with further left hands. Neither man was visibly hurt in these closing stages. The crowd’s dissatisfaction grew as the bout went on, with many spectators leaving before the decision.

The judges returned scores of 117–110, 117–110 and 116–111, all for Lara. The fourth-round knockdown was the contest’s only one. Lara had landed 121 of 528 punches to Gausha’s 77 of 329, figures that reflected both the champion’s command of the scoring and the long intervals in which neither boxer connected. Gausha suffered his first professional defeat; Lara had defended his title by controlling the range and giving his challenger few chances to make a sustained fight of it.

I understood why this fight interested people. Lara was a champion who could make good boxers miss, while Gausha was an unbeaten Olympian getting his chance to prove he belonged. But Gausha gave Lara the distance he wanted. He followed the Cuban’s feet, hesitated before throwing and offered too few punches to disrupt that southpaw jab and straight left. Lara dropped him in the fourth with a right-left combination, then went back to controlling the space.

I can appreciate Lara’s skill and still say the fight was poor. Gausha needed to force exchanges; he never did it often enough. Lara won clearly on points, and neither man gave the crowd much to remember.