April 2025 boxing predictions

The March Report

• Martin was winning on my card but some fighters just don't have luck on their side. I could not have been more right.
  • Prediction: Puello by split decision
  • Result: Puello by split decision
• Fantastic performance by Russell. I could not have been more wrong.
  • Prediction: Valenzuela by unanimous decision
  • Result: Russell by unanimous decision
• Roach should've won. I knew he could box but I underestimated how effectively he could neutralize an opponent. Tank (who wasn't giving much to neutralize) took a knee in the 9th round after getting hit by a punch, which any competent and fair-minded referee would have scored as a knockdown. The self-proclaimed face of boxing was getting tagged by shots for most of the fight. I'm tempted to already call this robbery of the year so far because both the judges and the referee were in the mix but I'll probably rewatch it before the anticipated rematch so will hold reservations until then.
  • Prediction: Davis by KO/TKO in middle rounds
  • Result: Majority draw (Davis retains title)
• Santiago was the deserved winner in what I figured would be a toss-up. Iwata had a very strong 5th round but then couldn't produce another 3-minute sequence like that for the rest of the fight. Santiago worked the jab from the outside and clinched when closed down or cornered, it wasn't pretty but it was a textbook performance of a boxer versus a fighter.
  • Prediction: Iwata by split decision
  • Result: Santiago by unanimous decision
• Kyoguchi put up a tough performance. I wasn't scoring the fight but Princesa can't put in such a sloppy performance if he fights Kenshiro again.
  • Prediction: Olascuaga by KO/TKO in the first half of the fight
  • Result: Olascuaga by unanimous decision
• I had Kenshiro needing a knockout to win on my card. The official judges saw it very differently. The referee saw something that made him think the fight should be stopped. Surely he could've sent Yuri Akui to the doctor if he was worried about the bleeding instead of ruining what was a fight of the year contender? It's still a great fight, but boxing needs great fights sans asterisks.
  • Prediction: Yuri Akui by unanimous decision
  • Result: Teraji by TKO 12
• It turns out the numpties in boxing media were right to call this a mismatch. After struggling to make weight in his old age, Ol' Man Doheny literally got his ass kicked at the end of the 1st round and it set The Rhythm of the Fight. Well, that and the random music being blasted between rounds.
  • Prediction: Ball by KO/TKO in first half of the fight
  • Result: Ball by RTD 10
• Booker never stood a chance.
  • Prediction: Fundora by unanimous decision
  • Result: Fundora by TKO 4
• 矢吹さん、素晴らしい！！ Poor Ayala did well to fight on for so long after getting dropped at the end of the first round.
  • Prediction: Yabuki by unanimous decision
  • Result: Yabuki by TKO 12
• Horrendous night on the microphone from Timothy Bradley. "[Cuaves] is coming in off a long lay-off as well. That could be good and also bad." Thankfully it was a short fight as Cuevas threw in the towel after a methodical display by Norman.
  • Prediction: Norman by KO/TKO in the second half of the fight
  • Result: Norman by TKO 3

6/10 correct winners, a bum month on my part. Part of it is still guesswork but I'm confident that if I had more free time to dedicate to this then I'd be more accurate. Not bad for a part-timer and thankfully the April schedule is sparser, it boasts only 2 (two) world title fights as it did last year.

April Schedule

Apr. 5th - Janibek Alimkhanuly vs. Anauel Ngamissengue, IBF/WBO @ 160lbs

Janibek should win his homecoming bout with ease but I expect he'll try to give fans their money's worth.

Prediction: Alimkhanuly by KO/TKO in middle rounds

Apr. 12th - Jaron "Boots" Ennis vs. Eimantas Stanionis, WBA/IBF @ 147lbs

Stanionis will be having his 3rd fight since a 2021 no-contest against a 40 year old Luis Collazo. Despite the inactivity, you might have seen him on the Canelo-Munguia undercard last May. As the next-best 147lbs fighter in the eyes the WBA (behind Terence "Bud" Crawford), Stanionis picked up their belt when Bud chose to shut the door on coming back down in weight. Boots was getting hit more than usual in his last fight, but given the level of competition at welterweight these days he may well become undisputed at welterweight in the next year or two.

Prediction: Ennis by unanimous decision

Select The One To Fight With

I only just found out that SNK (who I mentioned briefly when discussing the 'Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves' collabs with Ring Magazine) is 96.18% owned by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's MiSK Foundation. It goes some way to explaining why the winner of last season's Roshn Saudi League Top Scorer award is appearing in a fighting game. If it is an April Fools joke, then I respect that they went to the trouble of giving him a movelist, but they somehow forgot to give him divekicks.

If it is real, it left me wondering who this is for? Because giving this much prominence to someone in the long twilight of an undeniably successful career rather than a younger individual in their ascendancy is exactly the kind of mistake that boxing made with Ali. The difference is that there are other parties in football who will make sure that the likes of Messi and Ronaldo will fade, though not disappear, into the background as the past eventually ought to do. Someone like Lamine Yamal would never have the space to become a superstar for younger generations if everything gravitated towards the interests of old men.

Speaking of the interests of old men, remember comic books? In 2022 there was a mournful passage in Alan Moore's story collection Illuminations, this excerpt is from the novel-length short story What We Can Know About Thunderman, a biting satire about the comics biz and its decline (in the eyes of Moore).

"One major problem seemed to be that nearly everybody working in the business – artists, writers, editors and publishers – was a promoted comic fan who, though they might know everything about King Bee, had no original or viable ideas of their own that might conceivably alleviate the comic world’s near-terminal condition. Yet another difficulty was the readership, presently atrophied to something like a hundred thousand devotees, most of them middle-aged or older, a core audience that wasn’t merely shrinking, but was literally dying off. And which – since everybody had decided that comics weren’t just for kids, then that they weren’t for kids at all – meant that the industry had no way to replace those vanished readers, having confidently sawn away the branch it had been sitting on. The fans were drying up, blowing away, while the immortal, ageless beings – whom they had grown old and lonely in the service of – could only stand on Worsley Porlock’s stereo or coffee table, looking down on all this anxiously and wondering if they were next."

The boxing world is hardly in the best of shape these days either. How is a new fan supposed to begin caring about the sport? The usual answer is media. I've said my piece(s) on broadcasters before – and I live in hope that I won't have to again – so let's continue instead with the new-look Ring Magazine.

How would you react to this cover if you saw it in a store? Sike! It's a trick question, they don't sell Ring Magazine in stores. It's only available to purchase via their website as either a monthly or 12-month subscription (the print edition is 5 times more expensive than the digital edition, and that's before the worldwide $7.95/£7.95 per issue shipping fee). Back to the cover, it's by Rodrigo Lorenzo. You may remember him from that free Usyk-Fury comic. The comic is now paywalled behind the Ring Magazine subscription, though free physical copies were given away in Riyadh at the fight last year and are now hawked on eBay for 10-20 times the cost of a normal floppy. Oh right, the cover. Well, the posing is meh, the digital colours lack soul, and I wish that artists would bother learning how to draw a landed punch. I can't be too harsh though because the threat of AI-generated images loom large.

Slop has found its way to the social media channels of both Ring Magazine ("AI turned Chris Eubank Jr slapping an egg onto Conor Benn’s face into anime.") and Ring owner Turki Alalshikh's account. Even the only mock-up of the Times Square event is some garbage that had to have the correct logos photoshopped in. It's like that terrible Coca Cola ad where they hired "three AI studios using four different generative AI models" but still had to go frame by frame to get the logos right. All that time, energy and money to make a worse version of something that already exists. You gotta hand it to the AI industry folks though, they understand marketing. The world's biggest companies and governments are lining up to pour money into a very expensive and crappy anime PFP maker. Surely the magic bean bubble will burst one day? Boxing's did and since then it's not come anywhere near matching the global interest shown for Mayweather-Pacquiao 10 years ago. My totally original and viable idea is that you can only over-promise and under-deliver so much.