Osleys Iglesias didn’t stumble at all under the main event spotlight, staying undefeated with a fifth round stoppage of Petro Ivanov in Montreal.
It was a relatively long night of work for Iglesias, who took longer to close the show against the relatively unknown Ivanov than he did earlier this year against Sena Agbeko, Evgeny Shvedenko, and Marcelo Coceres combined.
Early on, Iglesias (13-0, 12 KO) seemed happy to work on the back foot, patiently waiting for openings and timing lightning quick counters. Ivanov (18-1-2, 13 KO) got rocked hard in the third, but stayed vertical and found his way to the end of the round. Iglesias shifted to doing more work on the front foot, leading to Ivanov losing his mouthpiece in what might have been a strategic move to catch a break.
Iglesias came out hot in the fifth, jabbing Ivanov into retreat, then blasting him with a counter uppercut-jab combo for a knockdown. Ivanov found his feet, but the referee didn’t like how he looked and called the fight to a halt. You could argue it was early, but it wasn’t unreasonable. Ivanov looked glassy-eyed, hadn’t gotten anything going, and Iglesias was starting to really unload on him.
Credit to Ivanov, who worked hard to avoid the third round knockdown and lasted longer than anyone has in almost two years. But Iglesias once again looked like a finely polished force in the making. It’s still largely an eye test evaluation, but Iglesias comes as close to acing that eye test as anyone I can recall in recent years. Hopefully, 2025 brings him the opportunity to prove himself against the best in the division.
Steven Butler TKO-1 Fernando Farias
Butler (35-5-1, 29 KO) needed a get-well victory after a knockout loss back in June, and found it against a 35-year-old Argentinian truck driver. No disrespect intended to Farias (12-3-3, 4 KO), who fought at welterweight earlier in his career and came in as a replacement on just a few weeks notice, but Butler was in another league. Farias went down halfway through the first round, then went down for a second and final time not much after for the TKO-1 finish.
Earlier results
- Wilkens Mathieu TKO-4 Marcos Karalitzky (3:00)
- Dzmitry Asanau TKO-5 Matias Rueda (2:58)
- Jhon Orobio TKO-1 Jacopo Colli (1:12)