Today’s fight between heavyweights Deontay Wilder and Zhilei Zhang will headline on the loaded Queenberry vs. Matchroom ‘5 vs. 5’ card, live on DAZN PPV at the Kingdom Arena in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Event details and start time:
– 2:00 p.m. ET / 7 pm UK time
– Price: $69.99 on DAZN PPV – Fight fans in UK can catch all the action on TNT Sports
– Kingdom Arena in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
– Date: Today, June 1st
Live updates and results of today’s action will be shown below.
Undefeated middleweight contender Hamzah Sheeraz (20-0, 16 KOs) used his height and reach to wear down and stop Austin ‘Ammo’ Williams (16-1, 11 KOs) in round eleven of a WBC title eliminator.
Sheeraz, the Queensberry Team captain, unloaded sledgehammer shots at the start of the eleventh to stagger Williams, sending him backward. The referee, Mark Lyson, then stepped in and waved it off.
Late in the tenth round, Sheeraz dropped Ammo Williams with a perfectly timed right hand to the head. Williams was badly hurt when he got to his feet, but luckily for him, the round ended before Sheeraz could finish him off. However, Williams was too hurt to recover between rounds and was immediately stopped at the start of the 11thi round.
Williams had his moments in the fight, hurting the 6’3″ Sheeraz with a straight left to the head in round one, and staggering him again in the fourth. Sheeraz took over the fight from the fifth round, as stayed on the outside and getting nailed with his power jab and hard right hands.
Ammo’s trainer, Kevin Cunningham, continually told him to crowd Sheeraz and keep the action in close, but he wasn’t consistent in doing so. It looked like he had no confidence in his ability to hurt Sheeraz on the inside, so he would retreat to the outside to load up on his lefts.
In hindsight, that was a bad idea becaue it allowed Sheeraz to use his jab, the equivalent of a power punch, and his right hand to land big shots.
Unbeaten Nick Ball (20-0-1, 11 KOs) used his nonstop pressure to wear down and defeat WBA featherweight champion Raymond Ford (15-1-1, 8 KOs), winning a razor-close twelve-round split decision.
Scores:
115-113: Ball
115-113: Ball
115-113: Ford
Ford was cut under his right eye and above his left eye early in the contest from the shots that Ball was raining on him with his high work rate. In the seventh round, Ford landed a powerful right hand that bloodied Ball’s nose.
Ford got the better of the action from rounds seven through eleven, using his jab and pinpoint lefts to outbox Ball. In the crucial twelfth round, Ball came alive, firing uppercuts and combinations to get the better of Ford. That proved to be the critical round in the fight.
Willy Hutchinson (18-1, 13 KOs) looked outstanding, boxing his way to a one-sided twelve-round unanimous decision victory over Craig Richards (18-4-1, 11 KOs). Hutchinson used movement and odd punching angles to dominate the 34-year-old Richards the entire fight.
In the tenth, Hutchinson has Richards in trouble after unloading a flurry of shots while he was against the ropes. The referee could have called it a knockdown because the ropes held Richards up while he was getting shelled nonstop with shots by Hutchinson. The judges scores were 116-112, 117-111, and 119-109.
Hutchinson beat Richards much easier than Dmitry Bivol had years ago, and he showed that he could be a future world champion in the light heavyweight division with this performance.
There’s a lot to see on this stacked card. In the main event, former WBC heavyweight champion Wilder (43-3-1, 42 KOs) fights the heavy-hitter Zhilei Zhang in a twelve-rounder. This fight has attracted the most interest from the boxing public due to Wilder’s star appeal and the fact there’s so much on the line for both aging fighters.
Main portion of card on DAZN PPV @ 2 pm ET
Deontay Wilder vs. Zhilei Zhang
Filip Hrgovic vs. Daniel Dubois
Dmitry Bivol vs Malik Zinad
Craig Richards vs. Willy Hutchinson
Austin “Ammo” Williams vs. Hamzah Sheeraz
Raymond Ford vs. Nick Ball
A clash that has attracted a surprise amount of interest is the middleweight bout between Austin ‘Ammo’ Williams and Hamzah Sheeraz. These two have done a lot of talking back and forth.
There’s a lot of animosity between them, and Williams is a personality that has turned the fight into theater with his tiger tail, and wearing a head dress during the weigh-in.
WBA featherweight champion Raymond Ford defends against the aggressive pressure fighter Nick Ball in a title fight that is expected to be a pure war from start to finish.
This is a fight that could be one of the more interesting ones for viewers, as Ball (19-0-1, 11 KOs) suffocates his opponents with his pressure and he’s going to be putting it on the boxer/puncher Ford (15-0-1, 8 KOs) every minute of action today. The referee is going to earn his pay for this clash.
WBA light heavyweight champion Dmitry Bivol Faces little known replacement opponent Malik Zinad in a 12-rounder. Zinad sees this fight as his golden ticket to get his name out there, and to move on to bigger and better things.
