SERGIO MARTINEZ Drew 12 KERMIT CINTRON

You think you’ve seen it all and then you realise that, no, you haven’t.

What happened on Saturday night on HBO’s Boxing After Dark show from Florida almost beggars belief.

Here we had Sergio Martinez, the Spanish-based Argentinean, having to settle for a draw against Kermit Cintron after some of the most bizarre events ever seen in the ring.

For a start, Martinez surely won by count-out in the seventh round of the 154-pound title bout, only for the fight to be restarted after his opponent protested over a non-existent head butt.

Then we had Martinez on his way to winning a decision when the referee, Frank Santore, suddenly deducted a point for a cuff to the back of Cintron’s head in the last round.

Yes, Martinez had been cautioned a few times for hitting on the back of the head, but the fight was almost over, Cintron had been ducking low, and no harm was done.

That point deduction cost Martinez victory — because then we come to the decision of a draw.

How the two Florida judges, Peter Trematerra and Ged O’Connor, had this fight all-even (113-113 on each card) is a mystery to me, as I am sure it is to many others. Veteran New Jersey judge Tommy Kaczmarek got it right with his score of 116-110 in favour of Martinez.

I didn’t have it as wide as Kaczmarek or HBO’s scorer, Harold Lederman, but I did have Martinez winning, 115-111.

OK, give Cintron another round. There were some close ones. I could have blown a round. Make it 114-12 in favour of Martinez. That was as close as I could possibly have seen this fight.

There was no question in my mind that Martinez won, not even a shadow of a doubt.

Martinez seemed to be landing more punches (certainly the CompuBox statistics bore this out), and he did more damage.

Cintron suffered a cut over the left eye as the result of a clean left-hand punch (the referee ruled a clash of heads but, OK, we can live with that, human error and all that), his nose was bloody, he had a bruise under the right eye and blotch on the forehead, he had been knocked down, and in the last round he was being thrashed all over the ring and looked all-in at the final bell.

What on earth was the fight that these judges were watching? Good Lord, it was hardly one of those “difficult to score” fights.

I knew that Martinez was going to be in trouble on the scorecards when Michael Buffer started to announce the scores. Buffer is a brilliant MC, maybe the greatest in ring history. He has a very clever way of putting a certain inflection in his voice when he is about to announce something, controversial, a “You’re not going to believe this” tone of voice.

Martinez laughed it all off, looking disbelieving but obviously relieved that at least he hadn’t been deprived of his WBC interim title.

He said afterwards that he had won the fight twice, first by knockout, then on points — and so it seemed.

I have watched and re-watched that controversial seventh round. Referee Santore clearly said “10” as Cintron was getting off the canvas.

Now, maybe I’m completely wrong on this, maybe I haven’t been quite understanding boxing all these years, but I always thought that when a referee said “10” it meant the count had been completed.

Cintron was getting up but he was not all the way up. When I was covering boxing in Britain for years the term for this would have been “counted out in the act of rising”.

Veteran British reporters would have written that Cintron “misjudged the count”.

These things happen. Many years ago in London an east London fighter named Terence Murphy threw a couple of punches at referee Tommy Little for counting him out in the first round of a light-heavy bout against Alex Buxton — Murphy got up just as the referee completed the count. (Referee Little was an ex-boxer and, as I recall, he dodged Murphy’s wildly thrown blows.)

Then, much more recently, Rafael Marquez jumped up at nine-and-a-half after getting dropped in the second round by Genaro Garcia in Denver. The referee, a gentleman named Novar Garcia, had, however, said “10” — the “doleful decimal” as old-time American writers called it — and much to Marquez’s frustration it was ruled that he been counted out.

Cintron, too, had surely been counted out.

As the bell had sounded after the apparent count-out there was some confusion over what exactly happened next, but referee Santore was heard to say, clearly, to Cintron: “It’s over” as he ushered the protesting fighter to his corner. Not: “The round’s over,” mind you, but: “It’s over.” As in: “The fight’s over.”

Almost immediately, an official or officials from the Florida commission were up in the ring, with Cintron insisting that he had been butted, which he hadn’t.

It looked to me very much as if the referee had been overruled by the commission — and so, after an extended interval of something like two-and-a-half minutes, the fighters were waved back into action.

Only in boxing do we have such craziness.

Martinez, who thought he had won — which in real terms he had — now had to refocus his mind on fighting after having prematurely celebrated victory.

Cintron, meanwhile, was now fighting with the urgency of a man who has been given a second chance and means to make the most of it.

I had Cintron winning the ninth round, and in the 10th he was catching and hurting a Martinez who suddenly seemed to have lost his concentration and his judgement of distance — although a shot on the chin can do that to a fighter.

Cintron, in fact, came back like a real fighter after the seventh-round reprieve. His emotional strength has been doubted, but Cintron didn’t fold up, he came right back at his tormentor. Leaving out all the madness of the occasion, I thought that this was a good performance by Cintron. He was well-balanced, used the jab better than I can remember him doing in the past, and looked to counter with the right hand and left hook. In general, I thought Cintron fought well, just not quite well enough.

Although Cintron was the one who went down in the fight, he always looked, to me, the bigger puncher and he looked dangerous almost to the very end. His trainer, Ronnie Shields, seems to have brought Cintron to a slightly higher level although of course the Puerto Rican has become an experienced fighter. Shields’s between-rounds exhortations brought the best out of Cintron, just the right measure of motivation needed to inspire a fighter who seemed to be behind but who was not yet out of the fight.

As it turned out, Cintron almost won on the scorecards, if not in reality.

Martinez was, even though I thought he clearly won, a bit disappointing. He showed a healthy respect for Cintron’s punching power and often was looking to edge his way to a winning round, with Cintron even calling to him at one point to stand and fight — which come to think of it might have had an effect on the scoring of the two judges who had the fight a draw. Or maybe the judges subconsciously penalised Martinez for his flashy, hands down, dancing-around style. Honestly, who knows what to think any more?

Still, although not nearly as dazzling as he looked when destroying Alex Bunema on HBO last October, Martinez was smart and artful, darting in with the rat-a-tat punches that were enough to win him the rounds, then using his legs to get away from Cintron’s counters. His speed and what we could call ring generalship got him home, or so it appeared.

As always though — and it shouldn’t be this way — whenever a fight goes to the scorecards in this day and age one holds one’s breath. You never know how the judges are going to see it, and now, more than ever, I understand trainer Emanuel Steward’s philosophy, which is: “I like knockouts; that way there’s no question who won.”

Martinez, of course, did get the knockout, or count-out, to be more accurate — at least he did as I understand boxing — but he didn’t get the win.

One can just sigh and say: “Well, that’s boxing” — but we seem to be saying this too often these days.