Bantamweight Tomoki Kameda now has two blemishes on his record after two unsuccessful grabs at Jamie McDonnell’s WBA World title.
The pair fought for the second time in four months this past Sunday and the action over the 12 took on a similar pattern to the first; Kameda starting fast and McDonnell building his way into proceedings and edging the rounds down the stretch.
McDonnell (27-2-1, 12 KO’s) was the unexpected winner back in May when he signed to face a Kameda on a 31-fight winning streak beginning at his pro debut in 2008. Now he has dispersed any lingering suspicions that the first win was a fluke by traveling over to Texas again to repeat the finest performance of his career.
Kameda is now in a very difficult position after two straight defeats as his momentum has been stopped dead. He trailed McDonnell on all three judges’ scorecards by just a single point after the first fight, but the scores for the second were much wider; 115-113, 116-111 and 117-110.
This is not to say he regressed. Most of the rounds were very closely contested and it was often difficult to determine who won each one outright. But McDonnell did the more consistent work out of the two, especially when he committed himself to going forward with a constant stabbing jab out in front.
Kameda for his part disagrees with both results, as he said in an interview with World Boxing News.
“I thought I won this fight a lot more clearly than the last fight. I followed our plan perfectly. I did everything right.”
He did cause McDonnell some troubles, landing some cracking hooks and uppercuts early on. However, just as in the first fight, he had no definitive plan for when he was pushed backwards. He launched some classy counter punches but couldn’t not muster a clean enough effort to score a knockdown this time either. In fact, it was he who touched down in the 12th after a right-hand caught him off-balance, effectively sealing the result against him.
Pungluang Sor Singyu of Thailand picked up the WBO belt Kameda vacated before the initial McDonnell fight. Juan Carlos Payano holds the WBA Super, Randy Caballero the IBF, and Shinsuke Yamanaka the WBC. This is a solid division and if Kameda is to remain here, there will be no easy pickings against which he can pick up another world belt. We will now see if the hype he arrived on the world scene with was justified.
