Isaac Cruz v Lamont Roach Ends In MD Draw

Isaac “Pitbull” Cruz and Lamont Roach Jr shared twelve furious, often scruffy rounds at the Frost Bank Center in San Antonio and still could not be separated on the cards. After a fight that swung one way and then the other, the judges returned scores of 115-111 for Cruz and two cards of 113-113, leaving us with a majority draw and Cruz keeping hold of his interim WBC super-lightweight title. It was a result that satisfied almost nobody and will fuel arguments for months.

From the opening bell, Cruz fought exactly as advertised. The stocky Mexican wasted no time, boring forward with his head tucked behind a high guard, feet churning, flinging hooks to body and head. Roach, moving up from super-featherweight, spent the first two rounds trying to keep the rushes at bay with his jab and neat footwork, but the tone early on belonged to Cruz. Every time he so much as thudded a glove into the ribcage, the largely pro-Mexican crowd roared its approval, and for a while, Roach looked in danger of being bullied into his shell.

The first major turning point came in the third. Pressing Roach toward a neutral corner, Cruz finally got the distance exactly where he wanted it and whipped in a short left hook. Roach’s legs dipped, his balance went, and as he tried to steady himself, his glove grazed the canvas. The referee ruled the inevitable knockdown. Roach rose at once and didn’t appear badly hurt, but on the scorecards it was a 10-8 frame and precisely the kind of early breakthrough Cruz’s marauding style is built to secure.

To his credit, Roach refused to be cowed by that moment. From the fourth round, he stopped backing up in straight lines and began to meet Cruz closer to the centre ring, asserting the jab and stitching right hands and left hooks together as the Mexican came steaming in. When they traded in the pocket, Roach paid a price – Cruz’s left hook behind the elbow and around the ear remained a constant menace – but the challenger was at last getting his own work done, catching Cruz on the way in and making him reset more often than he would have liked.

The fight’s complexion shifted again in the sixth, when Roach produced his best round to that point. After a clinch, he exploited a rare lapse in Cruz’s balance, standing him upright with a series of crisp shots, including a sharp jab followed by a thudding left hook that snapped the champion’s head to the side. Cruz, stubborn as ever, surged back with his own heavy shots, but for the first time, he was clearly being made to think about how he approached rather than simply wading forward behind brute strength.

The seventh was the sort of session promoters replay when they want to sell a rematch. Roach, now brimming with confidence, beat Cruz to the punch with a quick combination and then clipped him repeatedly with straight rights and hooks as the Mexican tried to maul on the inside. The clinching grew more frequent and messier, and eventually the referee stepped in and docked Cruz a point for hitting while holding. Given the earlier knockdown, that deduction dragged the arithmetic back towards level and planted a little extra jeopardy under every wild attack Cruz launched thereafter.

From there, the contest became a running argument between pressure and precision. Cruz continued to surge in bursts, swinging hooks and overhand rights with bad intentions, and every so often, he would land something that jolted Roach’s head and reminded everyone why he is so avoided. But Roach’s economy and timing increasingly told their own story. He threaded jabs through the guard, slipped just off the line of attack and dropped in counters – left hooks, uppercuts and tidy two- and three-punch combinations – as Cruz came barrelling past. By the ninth and tenth rounds, Roach was making the Mexican miss so wildly that frustration began to creep into Cruz’s body language.

If Roach supplied the cleaner work, Cruz responded in the only way he knows how, by trying to drag the fight into the trenches. He had his moments late, particularly with a heavy right hand in the eleventh that briefly froze Roach, but by then the American’s defence and movement were largely in tune with the rhythm of the assault. Roach slid along the ropes, picked his spots and kept his jab on Cruz’s face. The twelfth was fought at a frantic pace, Cruz charging out in search of something conclusive, Roach standing his ground more often and trading combinations in the centre. If a man was finishing with the sharper, more eye-catching punches, it was arguably Roach, who snapped Cruz’s head back with a final burst that drew applause even from sections of the crowd that had come to cheer the champion.

The punch statistics painted a picture that will only add petrol to the fire. Roach outlanded Cruz by 191 punches to 159 over the twelve rounds, connected with nearly half of his power shots and ended up with 21 more jabs scored. With the third-round knockdown and the seventh-round point deduction on Cruz effectively cancelling each other out on the cards, many at ringside and watching at home felt the challenger had shaded a close but clear victory. The judges, of course, saw something different: one went strongly for Cruz, the other two could not split them, and boxing chalked up another night where the numbers on the scorecards didn’t quite match the impression in the minds and eyes of most observers.

In the broader 140lb picture, the result leaves matters deliciously and maddeningly unresolved. Cruz retains his interim belt and his reputation as a snarling, high-risk proposition that the marquee names may not be in a hurry to sign for. Roach, meanwhile, now has back-to-back majority draws in fights many feel he deserved to win, first against Gervonta Davis and now against Cruz. The clamour for an immediate rematch will be loud and justifiable. Whether the business of boxing obliges is another question entirely. What is beyond dispute is that for twelve rounds in San Antonio, the bull and the matador both had their say – and neither quite did enough to close the argument.