DANIEL SANTOS KO6 JOACHIM ALCINE

There’s nothing quite like a one-punch knockout for settling matters. Daniel Santos found such a punch and put paid to the previously unbeaten hometown favourite Joachim Alcine in startling fashion in their junior middleweight title fight in Montreal on Friday night.

This was one of those out-of-the-blue endings. After five nip-and-tuck rounds, I thought that Santos was winning the fight, 48-47, and he looked the superior boxer. His quick, crafty moves from the southpaw style seemed to be confusing Alcine. Santos was the one who looked more comfortable in the fight, but Alcine was getting in some right hands.

Then, with just one punch in the sixth, it was all over.

I definitely had not anticipated a one-shot finish on either side, yet the possibility existed. Alcine has been knocked down a couple of times and he was wobbled by the Argentinean, Javier Mamani; Santos has been stopped once and he was dropped by Neil Sinclair and Sergei Dzinziruk.

Alcine tends to start slowly so it was no surprise that he was having difficulty in the early rounds. He struggled early against Travis Simms but was practically running his opponent out of the ring in the later rounds.

One thing the Alcine camp has always said about their man is that he is an adaptable fighter and can adjust his tactics. Maybe Alcine could have done so against Santos, but I rather doubt it. I thought that Santos was starting to dictate matters in the sixth and he looked like the man who, as they say in Britain, fancied the job. Alcine was looking a bit frustrated, I thought, and just a bit discouraged. He started to throw a big overhand right, but Santos beat him to it with a left thrown with perfect timing from his southpaw style, dropping the Montreal boxer flat on his back.

I would rank this among the best one-punch endings I have ever seen, and it was stunning because Santos, while he can definitely hit, is not known for quite that sort of punching power — he had scored just two stoppages in his last seven fights and one of those was against a boxer who had been knocked out in his last three fights.

The ending reminded me a bit of Michael Nunn’s one-punch finish against Sumbu Kalamabay — also achieved with a big left from the southpaw style — but that was much more shocking because Kalambay was considered resilient whereas Alcine had previously shown a weakness in the chin department.

Still, the defending champion had sparred with his heavy-handed stable mate Adonis Stevenson, who told the Montreal media that he had landed big shots in the gym and that Alcine never went anywhere.

In the ring, though, with the smaller gloves, no headguards and in actual fighting conditions, it is all very different.

This was no lucky punch. Right from the start you could see that Santos was looking to throw the left hand — for much of the fight he had it cocked. In the sixth he got the perfect opening and he seized the opportunity.

It is difficult to see Alcine coming back from this. He is 30, and it was a devastating KO. If his chin was a little questionable before, it will be much more so in the future.

With this win, Santos becomes a three-time world champion. He was a welterweight champion eight years ago, but surprisingly he is still only 32.

In Montreal, the feeling was that this fight would show Alcine to be one of boxing’s stars. Instead it put Santos back on top, a fine fighter who, right from the start, had a winner’s mindset. There was a real sense of do or die about Santos in this fight, a fired-up, give-it-everything intensity that I just didn’t detect in Alcine. With half the fight to go, though, the issue was still in doubt — until that thunderbolt of a left hand provided a conclusive and concussive finish.