LIBRADO ANDRADE TKO8 ROBERT STIEGLITZ

Librado Andrade can be made to miss, outboxed, and hit with counter punches — but it is very difficult to keep him at bay. Robert Stieglitz, the German-based Russian, discovered this on Saturday night as Andrade wore him down and finally walked through him in eight one-sided but entertaining rounds.

The IBF 168-pound title eliminator victory gives Andrade a second chance at becoming a world champion. I am not sure if he has improved enough to beat the likes of Mikkel Kessler, who outclassed him in Denmark last year, but a lot of fighters will find Andrade’s pressure and high punch-rate just too much for them.

So it was with Stieglitz. In almost every round he had fleeting success as he ran off his combinations, yet the rounds ended the same way, with Stieglitz being bullied back, covering up as Andrade poured punches at him, the hooks to the body and left uppercuts through the middle being particularly effective.

Nose streaming blood from early in the fight, Stieglitz was always struggling. It seemed that Stieglitz was starting to wilt by the fifth round but he kept rallying, if ineffectively. When he got hurt by a right hand in the eighth, though, his resistance finally crumbled and Stieglitz was no longer fighting back when referee Ray Corona waved the finish after two minutes, 53 seconds of the round.

Andrade looked as if he was enjoying the fight, and the way he kept steaming in, seemingly untroubled by anything that was thrown at him, must have been enormously discouraging for Stieglitz, a capable boxer who, in the end, was broken in spirit as much as in body.