Last night I saw Filipino WBO bantamweight champion John Riel Casimero get away with one of the dirtiest moves in boxing….hitting Guillermo Rigondeaux when he was already down!
It seems the referee didn’t care or didn’t bother to warn him or DQ him for that move. We all remember how Roy Jones Jr. was disqualified and lost his titles to Montell Griffin when he hit him once when he was falling down, he didn’t even get a warning the referee just stopped it and he got the DQ.
Casimero in the first round not only hit Rigondeaux when he was down with his glove touching the canvas but he hit him in the back of the head right before that.
It is one of the cardinal sins of boxing to hit a man when he is already down. I’ve seen Casimero and his team boasting about the win. They should be ashamed of it because they didn’t deserve it. They didn’t even come out and apologize for that, instead the manager of Casimero, Sean Gibbons, continued the trash talk insulting Rigondeaux for what they call running.
Rigondeaux moves like a graceful ballerina and Casimero couldn’t touch him and yet they call that running?
Defense and ring generalship of the slick Cuban southpaw is what excelled and Casimero was a bull who kept missing and hitting air. This was a 40-year-old fighter taking a 31-year-old to school, now imagine if the two-time Olympic Gold Medalist was 5 years younger? He would have wiped the floor with the Filipino version of Ricardo Mayorga.
Of course Rigondeaux wasn’t willing to engage after the first round because he felt the dirty tactics and feared for his health. Rabbit punching can cause brain swelling, and it was clear the referee wasn’t going to punish Casimero so Rigondeaux had to fight off the back foot to avoid those wild punches.
Casimero and his team can celebrate that gift win over the great Rigondeaux but he won’t be able to hold that WBO title for long because if he does fight Monster Naoya Inoue or even Nonito Donaire they will knock him out if he tries to swing wild like that.
All that trash talk will comeback to bite him in the butt, and after his poor performance last night Inoue and Donaire are licking their chops to get a crack at him to shut him up after all the disrespect he spoke about them for months.
