Sunday 3 November 2019 13:40, UK
Saul 'Canelo' Alvarez viciously knocked out Sergey Kovalev to claim a world championship in his fourth weight division on Saturday night in Las Vegas.
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A brutal straight right hand in the 11th crumpled Kovalev to the floor, earning Canelo the WBO light-heavyweight title.
The Mexican superstar had jumped two divisions and a close, cagey fight between two elite boxers of this generation seemed destined for the judges' scorecards until he exploded into life with an impressive stoppage.
Canelo was winning on two out of three scorecards (the other was a draw) at the time of the stoppage.
It had seemed that Canelo might have had to rely on those scorecards because, until the vicious conclusion, neither fighter had encountered any serious difficulty that threatened to halt the fight.
Kovalev's ramrod jab was a useful weapon in the first half of the fight and he used it to keep the shorter, stockier Canelo at bay.
The body shots from Canelo, theorised pre-fight as his most obvious route to victory, first appeared in the second round when they thudded home and were never far away from Kovalev's ribs for the rest of the fight.
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Canelo succeeded in applying intense pressure with his skilful footwork forcing Kovalev to tire himself out just to stay at a comfortable distance. In this moments, Canelo thumped him to the body, particularly with a left hook in the fifth round.
Canelo upped the pace in the middle rounds and, when he did so, it felt like he would take advantage of his 36-year-old opponent's extra mileage. Kovalev had, after all, only had a 10-week turnaround since his previous win against Britain's Anthony Yarde and had been hand-picked by Canelo for this fight.
But Kovalev's weighty jab stopped the fight from running away from him in the eighth and ninth rounds, creating a nervy final few periods with the world title dangling precariously.
But it ended in a brutal flash, out of nowhere - Canelo caught Kovalev on the top of the head, then shook him with a left hook, and knocked him out cold with a right hand.
He now has a say in three divisions, and holds titles at middleweight and light-heavyweight. Attention will quickly switch to his expected next outing on Cinco de Mayo in May and a potential trilogy with his great rival Gennadiy Golovkin, which Canelo did not rule out in his post-fight interview.
