Isaac “Pitbull” Cruz retained his WBC interim super lightweight title with a crushing sixth-round knockout of Nestor Bravo before calling out Ryan Garcia in San Diego.

Cruz improved to 29-3-2 with 19 knockouts after finding the finish at Pechanga Arena following a scrappy opening to the contest.

Both fighters spent portions of the early rounds wrestling for position, forcing referee Thomas Taylor to issue warnings as Cruz struggled to establish the relentless pressure usually associated with his style.

Bravo was eventually deducted a point for throwing Cruz to the canvas in the fourth. Cruz responded in the best possible way by hurting the Puerto Rican with a left hook later in the round.

Bravo recovered and enjoyed a better fifth before Cruz produced the decisive moment.

A perfectly placed lead left hook in the sixth buckled Bravo’s legs and sent him to the canvas. Taylor immediately called the fight off at 1:30, handing Cruz another knockout victory.

“We worked on that punch in camp,” Cruz said. “That specific shot. We took our time and it worked out perfectly.”

Bravo questioned the stoppage afterwards but admitted Cruz had been the better man.

Cruz then wasted little time identifying who he wants next.

“Hey Ryan, I’m here. My next fight is with you. Come on Ryan, come on!” Cruz said.

“December, May or September. If Ryan wants to fight me, it doesn’t matter when. I’ll be ready.”

Marcial Lands One-Punch Finish

Eumir Marcial produced the quickest finish of the televised bouts with a one-punch knockout of Omar Ulises Huerta.

The Filipino Olympic bronze medalist timed Huerta’s left hand and fired back with a right hook that sent his opponent crashing to the canvas.

The contest was over at 1:08 of the third round, moving Marcial to 8-0 with five knockouts.

Blancas Remains Unbeaten

Daniel Blancas continued his unbeaten rise at super middleweight by stopping Sergio Jimenez in the seventh round.

Jimenez had never previously been stopped, but Blancas gradually broke him down with pressure and repeated attacks to the body. A ringside doctor examined Jimenez after the sixth before allowing him to continue.

Blancas picked up where he left off until referee Ray Corona decided Jimenez had taken enough at 1:38 of the seventh. Blancas moved to 16-0 with eight stoppages.

Verde Survives First Knockdown

Green Frame experienced the first knockdown of his professional career before recovering to stop Guillermo Hernandez in five rounds.

The Mexican Olympic silver medalist was caught off balance by a right hand in the third but quickly regained control.

Hernandez continued to absorb punishment until the contest was halted at 1:46 of round five. Verde improved to 7-0 with four knockouts.

About the Author

Phil Jay is the Editor-in-Chief of World Boxing News (WBN), a BWAA-acknowledged boxing news website founded in 2010. A veteran boxing reporter with 16 years of experience, he has interviewed world champions, broken international exclusives, and reported ringside from major events. His work is published worldwide through WBN and distributed on platforms including Apple News.

Read Phil Jay’s full bio and latest stories.

Anthony Joshua turning to Ben Davison to crack the Tyson Fury code is a flawed strategy built on outdated history. While Joshua balances visits to Oleksandr Usyk’s team in Spain and Derrick James in Texas, Davison’s presence in camp is being sold as an inside track on Fury. In reality, Davison’s playbook offers nothing useful against the Kronk fighter Fury became years ago.

Joshua recently spent time in Spain working around Team Usyk, yet he has returned to Davison’s gym in Essex while keeping ties with Derrick James open. Eddie Hearn has refrained from naming a single head trainer or confirming a permanent camp base, although he took steps to remove doubt surrounding Davison’s presence.

“I think in some capacity he’ll stay close to them,” Hearn stated regarding Joshua’s ties to Usyk’s team. “He’s always been, even when Ben wasn’t his principal trainer, working with him strategically, talking all the time. I think he respects Ben a lot. Obviously, there’s probably a feeling that Ben Davison knows Tyson Fury extremely well. I don’t know AJ’s final decision to where he’s going to locate his training camp, but Ben Davison will definitely be involved in that camp and that process.”

Davison’s familiarity with Fury cuts both ways. Fury knows how Davison schemes, how he sequences combinations, and how he reacts when a fight slips away from the whiteboard. Any blueprint reliant on years past will run into a fighter who knows the playbook just as well.

The bigger problem is that Davison worked with a completely different fighter. Davison guided the elusive version of Fury who completed a comeback and survived Deontay Wilder across twelve rounds in 2018. That fighter was a survival project built on light jabs, lateral evasion, and snatching rounds from the outside. Fury realized the limitations of that safety-first approach, parted ways with Davison in late 2019, and went to SugarHill Steward to resurrect the Kronk style.

Under Steward, Fury abandoned the backfoot bouncing, added twenty pounds of solid bulk, and committed to walking opponents down. He uses heavyweight bullying to control the ring: collar ties, framing with the forearms, turning opponents in the clinch, and dropping his upper body weight over their neck and shoulders. Davison never coached that style, never cornered Fury while he executed it, and was abandoned because Fury outgrew the light-hitting system Davison specializes in.

Preparing Joshua for the 2018 iteration of Fury is a trap. The modern Fury will not waste energy trying to outbox Joshua cleanly from the outside. He will lean his massive frame on Joshua, tie up his arms, and make every round an exhausting physical grind.

Consulting Team Usyk brings its own tactical contradictions. Usyk neutralized Fury using rapid lateral escapes, constant rhythm disruption, and cruiserweight agility. Joshua is a muscular, upright heavyweight who moves in straight lines. Forcing Joshua to mimic Usyk’s fluid footwork while executing Davison’s mechanical combinations will only leave him disjointed.

Trainer hopping has defined Joshua’s post-McCracken career. Moving through Robert Garcia, Derrick James, Davison, and Team Usyk points to a fighter looking for external solutions to internal doubts. When Joshua faces adversity, conflicting philosophies will paralyze him.

Joshua does not need a committee of trainers offering polite suggestions. He needs a single corner authority with absolute control over the strategy. If Joshua carries multiple voices into the ring, the hesitation will give Fury all the openings he needs.

The recent disaster with Moses Itauma against Filip Hrgovic exposed the exact same systemic flaws that showed up when Daniel Dubois ran right through Joshua at Wembley. Davison builds intricate, lab-tested game plans for the opening bell, but the moment a heavyweight fight turns into an ugly, grueling dogfight, his system breaks down.

Against Hrgovic, Itauma had everything going his way early, scored a knockdown, and swept rounds, yet the tank emptied completely because the conditioning foundation was not built for deep waters. When the crisis hit, Davison had no Plan B, telling a gassed 21-year-old to take deep breaths instead of giving him a practical survival strategy.

That identical corner paralysis was on full display against Dubois. Joshua walked out stiff, mechanical, and completely unprepared for a fighter charging forward with bad intentions. When Dubois clipped him in the first round, Davison looked lost. There were no adjustments to clinch, buy time, or change the target. Joshua was left wandering into right hands until the fifth-round finish.

The fact that Joshua kept Davison after the Dubois demolition shows a fighter desperately clinging to the comfort of Davison’s praise rather than demanding hard-nosed accountability. Joshua believes Davison holds the secret blueprint to beat Fury because Davison was in Fury’s corner years ago.

Relying on Davison to outscheme Fury is a massive tactical error. Fury knows Davison’s limitations better than anyone, which is why Fury left him for SugarHill Steward in the first place. If Joshua walks into a fight against Fury depending on Davison’s whiteboard tactics, he is walking into the exact same trap that cost Itauma his undefeated record and left Joshua flat on his back against Dubois.

Christian Mbilli looks at Canelo Alvarez and sees an ancient relic from a bygone boxing era, a fighter whose dominance was artificially preserved through years of soft, handpicked opposition before reality caught up to him last year.

WBC super middleweight champion Mbilli (29-0-1, 24 KOs) will defend his belt against Canelo (64-3-2, 39 KOs) on October 31 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The bout tops a DAZN pay-per-view card. Mbilli knows the clock has run out on Canelo’s smoke-and-mirrors run. After the interviewer noted that Mbilli had previously labeled the 36-year-old Canelo old and past his peak, the champion refused to soften his stance.

“Of course. Yes, it’s very good timing for me to take him. He’s still very dangerous. He has big power and good counterpunching. I have to be careful, but I think it’s very good timing for me,” Mbilli said. “I think my pressure and my energy [are advantages]. I put a lot of energy and a lot of pressure.”

Canelo took this fight because Riyadh offered a massive paycheck to headline on October 31, but stylistically and physically, he is playing with fire.

When Gennadiy Golovkin was 36, he was still tracking fighters down, jabbing their heads back into the cheap seats, and maintaining relentless pace round after round. Canelo, 36, turned professional at fifteen years old. He has sixty-nine fights, over five hundred grueling rounds, and two full decades of wear and tear grinding away at his joints. His athletic odometer reads more like forty-two than thirty-six. Canelo has turned into a high-end luxury vehicle running on fumes. In his last stretch of fights, the pattern became undeniable.

He works in short sixty-second bursts, leaning back on the ropes, trying to hide behind a tight guard while taking deep breaths. Once that gas tank hits empty around round six, he does not recover. There is no second wind. Against Terence Crawford, that inability to sustain work resulted in complete technical surrender. He just stood there, unable to mount offense, looking bewildered because his physical vehicle refused to respond to the commands in his brain.

Mbilli is an aggressive pressure fighter; walking straight toward him would deliver easy counterpunching opportunities. That is the old Canelo arrogance talking, the memory of what he used to do to brawlers who lacked defense. The problem for Canelo is that Mbilli is not going to stand politely at mid-range, admiring his reputation or waiting for permission to throw. Mbilli unloads eighty to ninety punches a round. He crowds, headbutts, leans, and hammers away with bad intentions.

If Canelo gasses out after four rounds of trading and parks himself on the ropes looking for rest, Mbilli will not let him breathe. He will drown him under a relentless avalanche of leather. Unless Canelo can catch Mbilli early with a perfect, fight-altering counter hook down the pipe to force total respect, this matchup has all the ingredients of an embarrassing changing-of-the-guard beatdown.

Watching a legendary fighter get battered on his feet simply because his legs and lungs died on him five rounds earlier is one of the ugliest sights in boxing. Canelo may find out the hard way in Riyadh that you cannot overhaul a shot engine inside twelve rounds against a relentless physical wrecking ball.

If Mbilli dominates Canelo and exposes his shot gas tank in October, Riyadh Season finds itself holding a depreciated asset with one contractual commitment left to fulfill.

That puts the Saudi organizers in an awkward matchmaking bind. A rematch with Mbilli makes zero promotional sense. You pointed directly to the blueprint Canelo has followed throughout his entire career. He is not Sugar Ray Robinson traveling to Europe to instantly avenge Randy Turpin. Canelo treats losses as business write-offs.

When Floyd Mayweather schooled him, Canelo walked away. When Dmitry Bivol outclassed him, Canelo made polite noise about a return, then ran straight back to Gennadiy Golovkin and John Ryder, never stepping anywhere near Bivol again. After Terence Crawford outpointed him, Canelo accepted the check and moved on. If Mbilli batters him, Canelo predictably will never mention Mbilli’s name again.

That leaves Riyadh Season with a damaged commodity to burn off in their final contractual bout.If Turki Alalshikh turns around and pairs Sheeraz with Canelo after Mbilli dismantles the Mexican veteran, the optics would be rotten to the core.

You would have Sheeraz, an exposed belt-dropper branded as a runner by hardcore fight fans, standing across from a battered, shot version of Canelo coming off a stoppage or a one-sided drubbing. It would not be an elite championship contest. It would be an artificial, manufactured cash-out designed to prop up a fighter who just sprinted away from his real test.

Promoting that as a marquee event would be grotesque. The storyline cannot be sold as two supreme titans colliding. The hardcore fans would view it as a disgraced runner being rewarded with an elderly, worn-out punching bag who could not keep his legs under him against Mbilli.

If Canelo gets embarrassed on October 31, tossing him into the ring with Sheeraz would not fool anyone. It would just be a cynical liquidation sale where the promoter tries to pass a manufactured torch to an anointed favorite who was terrified of fighting his own mandatory.