EDDIE CHAMBERS W10 (maj.) SAMUEL PETER

There’s no doubt that Eddie Chambers has smart boxing skills and a classy left hand but as he himself admitted after outpointing Samuel Peter, he has to let his hands go a bit more than he’s been doing.

I made Chambers a close but clear winner over Peter in the Friday Night Fights main event, but this was a fight he could easily have blown on the judges’ scorecards.

Judge Ray Corona had no doubt that Chambers won, and his 99-91 scorecard indicated that in his opinion a boxing lesson had been administered, but judges Marty Denkin and Max De Luca saw it as a far closer contest. Denkin scored the fight a draw, 95-95 while De Luca had it 96-94 in favour of Chambers (in the post-fight announcement the scores of Denkin and De Luca were transposed).

A lot of Peter’s punches were being blocked, but when he was throwing his slow but heavy hooks and right hands, and Chambers was just covering up, then the more active fighter was always likely to find favour with the judges.

Chambers did a good jab with the left jab, though. His jab was smacking into Peter’s face time and again, and Chambers also drove in some stiff deliveries to his opponent’s ample midriff.

I don’t think Chambers is what some would call a lazy fighter. It just seems that he has the sort of mindset in which, after doing well, he focuses more on not getting hit than in continuing to hit his opponent. He almost admitted this in the post-fight interview when he said he was concerned that if he threw his right hand he would get countered.

My impression was that if Chambers had put some shots together he could have made this a much more convincing win, but he was in the ring, he could sense the weight of Peter’s punches, and he boxed the sort of fight that got him his biggest win, and I suppose one shouldn’t be too critical. He seems to recognise that he has to do more in a fight, but I am wondering if he can ever change. This is the third time now when, in an important fight, he has eased off after looking dominant. It happened in his too-close win over Calvin Brock and then, of course, when he allowed Alexander Povetkin to swarm all over him.

Peter, meanwhile, has gone from champion to what the trade would call a “name opponent”. His weight of 265 pounds (OK, he was wearing jeans and one of those African embroidered shirts) did not indicate a super-rigorous training camp, and he was painfully slow and easy to hit. It seems to me, too, that to an extent he has lost confidence in himself. He was standing off and giving Chambers respect when he should have been going right at him and putting pressure on him. Maybe, though, at this stage in his career Peter simply doesn’t have it in him to fight that sort of fight.