Who won? Kovalev or Ward?

[Gandalf]

7 - W
8 - W
9 - W
10- K
11 - W
12 - W

So, there you have it. A tale of two cities, a fight of two halves and a knockout to decide it.

I think Kovalev edged a very close fight. It was clearly the fight to show who the best in the division is, but all this talk of P4P is a bit corny IMO. Ward looked very flawed and lost half a fight, while Kovalev seems to have fallen asleep and given away half a fight. Top P4P fighters like Floyd or Manny don't do that. When you see Barrera against Morales you see close fights, but you see brilliant boxing not clinching or doing little for several rounds. That's the big difference. These are very good fighters in their class, but they are not the best PFP IMO. To be honest, I found the fight a bit tedious and my appetite for a rematch is reduced after seeing this.

[Gandalf]

Knockdown I mean, though I wish there had been a KO to end the tedium.

[palmerq]

I think Kovalev edged a very close fight. It was clearly the fight to show who the best in the division is, but all this talk of P4P is a bit corny IMO. Ward looked very flawed and lost half a fight

to be fair to ward he has gone up in weight to fight one of the best out there, he did have 2 fights at light heavyweight before this of course but they were really not the proper preperation to take on kovalev especially considering wards inactivity since beating froch, maybe that is wards faul maybe it isnt but I think he took on a great opponent with inadequate preperation and gave a very good account of himself, I think ward was definently surprised by kovalevs power and was not ready for it at all, I would like to see a rematch as i think kovalev won but ward was getting better as the fight went on. I had a similar scorecard as you, same scoreline but maybe not the exact rounds. I also thought this was a really interesting fight due to it being so close.

[Gandalf]

I think I was just expecting a bit more, but I have seen a lot of Ward fights, so I probably should have known better. He seldom gives a clean, fun fight. I was also disappointed with Kovalev, who seemed to fight very within himself and certainly in the second half should been upping the workload himself. A great fighter sees that the other guy has adapted and finds a different gear too and Kovalev looked a little one dimensional in that regard. You could see Ward adapting, but I didn't really see that in Kovalev. He was too conservative and if there is a rematch is the one that needs to show greater versatility.

When you think of the best fighting the best you have a lot of great fights in mind and this was more akin to a Wlad fight than any of that. Who can grabble the most? Who can throw as little as possible? Who can go for a walkabout the longest? It gets a bit dull.

[p4pking]

I still haven't rewatched it, as doing so will be more out of curiosity in seeing if I can agree with he verdict. Since I didn't care who won I decided to do other meaningless stuff instead today. If you gave the 10th to Ward you'd wind up with exactly what all 3 judges had it, he didn't need a knockdown when you said he did, just to point that out.

It's one of those fights where if you took all the people crying robbery and asked them to score it, there would probably be different rounds they gave to Ward between them, and assuming you could find 7 it makes the uproar pretty easy to refute. My impresion watching it live was that all 3 judges gave Ward basically every round they could have, which does seem like they had a dog in it. I read earlier that Kovalev is with HBO and Ward is a free agent, make of that what you will, but it could be a powerplay in terms of keeping his purse smallish again in a rematch.