MIGUEL COTTO W12 (split) JOSHUA CLOTTEY

Jack Broughton called it “milling on the retreat”, and the long-departed bare-knuckle great might have given a nod of approval to Miguel Cotto’s use of movement and smart boxing as the bloodied Puerto Rican outscored Joshua Clottey in Saturday night’s welterweight title fight at Madison Square Garden.

A split decision was to be expected after such a well-contested bout, but to me there was no doubt that Cotto deserved the win.

Clottey had victory in his grasp in the eighth round, yet let the fight slip away.

It is true that Clottey was moving forward in the later rounds, and he looked the stronger man — but walking in with gloves up, following an opponent around the ring and not throwing punches, doesn’t win rounds.

The fight was there for the taking, but Clottey didn’t drive himself forward with the extra effort that was needed.

Cotto won with superior tactics, the old “ring generalship” thing. He moved, stopped to punch and moved again. Clottey, after looking so good at numerous stages of the fight, just seemed to lose the plot.

From round nine onwards, Clottey, it appeared to me, stalked patiently but with insufficient sense of purpose, while Cotto jabbed, moved, threw quick bursts of punches and thereby stole rounds — but stole them legitimately.

If fights were decided by which man looked the worse for wear at the finish, then Clottey would have been the winner. Cotto had the wicked-looking cut over the left eye that he suffered in the third-round clash of heads, and his nose was bloody, while Clottey was unmarked.

However, the sport is still called boxing, and Clottey was being outboxed.

Cotto’s movement in the later rounds wasn’t allowing Clottey to get set to punch. Although Clottey blocked many blows on his high guard, he wasn’t firing off his own shots.

Perhaps Clottey thought that if he was the one moving in, and wasn’t being hurt, that he was winning rounds. It doesn’t quite work that way, though. Cotto was outsmarting him and outpointing him.

HBO analyst Emanuel Steward had Clottey winning but “fell in love” with Cotto’s gameness in fighting on when other boxers might have looked for a technical-decision escape hatch.

The suspense was prolonged by the long wait for the scorecards, which showed Cotto ahead by scores of 116-111 and 115-112 on two judges’ cards, and Clottey leading 114-113 on the third card.

With a number of close rounds, divergent scores were understandable. Cotto’s 10-8 opening round, when his stiff left jab sat down an off-balance Clottey, in the end didn’t prove to be his margin of victory — he would have won even without scoring the fight’s sole knockdown.

Clottey did some excellent scoring with the left hook to the body and left uppercut through the middle, and he also enjoyed success with the jab and straight right hand, although I did notice that Cotto was slipping a lot of punches or turning his head at the last moment to minimise the effect.

Cotto overall was the busier man, though, and his combinations to the body and use of the jab enabled him to snatch rounds when Cotto fell into his move-in-without-punching pattern.

Clottey’s heavy fall in the fifth, when Cotto hoisted him off his feet in a clinch, certainly didn’t help the African fighter — but the Puerto Rican boxer was having to wipe blood from his left eye.

A big sixth round from Cotto, with Clottey under fire on the ropes, seemed to have put the champion firmly in control, but then the fight turned again as the Ghanaian fighter made a big push in the seventh and eighth.

Then, inexplicably, Clottey allowed his intensity level to fall off. It was as if he had been given the key to the vault — and lost the key.

Cotto showed a champion’s heart but I was astonished that his corner didn’t whisper into his ear “Your vision’s blurred” and go for a technical decision win after four rounds, because the slice over his eye was certainly a bad one — and looked much worse than the cut on Ivan Calderon’s forehead that brought a technical draw result in the junior flyweight title bout earlier in the evening.

Perhaps the Puerto Rican’s corner wasn’t sure that Cotto had enough points in the bank — but the fans benefited because a premature ending would have been disappointing.

After 11 gruelling rounds it was Cotto who provided the eye-catching finish. When Clottey dropped to one knee and made a big fuss after being hit on the back of the head — when his back was turned — in the last round, the thought crossed my mind that this wasn’t the way that world-class fighters are supposed to act in a title fight.

I would rather have seen Clottey going after Cotto hell-for-leather than trying to get a point deducted from his opponent.

In the end, despite fighting well, and at times superbly, Clottey couldn't deliver the late-rounds surge that would have tipped the fight in his favour.

Yet while I made Cotto a clear and deserving winner, I did get the sense that he has reached his peak and might be starting to descend the other side of the mountain. He is a fine, courageous boxer and a solid puncher, but this was a night when he could have been beaten.

Cotto pulled himself through and found a route to victory, which is what champions do, but it was an ordeal, and I fear that his hard fights, especially last July’s battering at the perhaps loaded hands of Antonio Margarito, might have taken a toll. He won on Saturday, but I am asking myself if Cotto can have very many more fights like this left in him.