(MAY 30) In a hall
that was overheated, galvanized by her fans, who were in excitation
at the beginning and seventh heaven at the end, Anne-Sophie Mathis
brought the tough Bulgarian Borislava Goranova to her knees in
Dombasle (Meurthe-et-Moselle) on Saturday for the second time in
seven months, and in the process sent a harrowing reminder of her
punching power to arch-rival Myriam Lamare, whom she faces in
Marseille on the 29th June and who in her own encounter
with the Bulgarian (in Lyon on the 20th March 2004) had
conspicuously failed to do the same.
For Lamare, who was at pains to point
out to Canal+ viewers on Thursday that her loss last December to
Mathis was not the first but the second major defeat of her career,
and that she had bounced back from the first to win the amateur
world championship the following year, the news of Mathis's twelfth
straight win inside the distance must still have had an unsettling
effect.
Saturday's outing was
intended as a final tune-up – "intensified sparring", as Mathis's
trainer, René Cordier, put it – for the world championship fight
with Lamare. "All the same, it was hard," said the WBA light
welterweight world champion. "This fight was much more interesting
that the one against the Lithuanian [Bojare, whom Mathis stopped
four weeks ago in the second round] in Villerupt. The Bulgarian has
a very tight guard that I found difficult to penetrate, and she
knows my game. What's more, she was stooping a lot, so I couldn't
get at her liver. It wasn't easy to make use of my reach."
Unswayed by the
general euphoria (a Dombasle girl herself, Mathis entered to a
standing ovation and left to a storm of applause), René Cordier
detected worrying signs of hubris in his charge: "She's become
altogether too cocksure," he complained. "She needs to be more
vigilant."
Mathis admits she
made mistakes on Saturday but explains: "I can never get going until
I've been hit a few times." Besides, as she told Netboxe in an
interview last December, "Lamare maintains a good rhythm, but she
doesn't hit like a man – nor even as hard as Larisa Berezenko."
Mathis hits hard. She
sets to work with those long arms like a whaler with a flensing
hook, and the self-belief of her opponents comes away in blubbery
chunks.
"Goronova was in no
mood to be pushed around," recounts Sébastien GEORGES of L'Est
Républicain. "She resisted stubbornly but seemed incapable of
landing a single punch of her own. Anne-Sophie Mathis wasted no time
getting on top of her and had already the ascendancy by the end of
the first round. The second confirmed my suspicions that the fight
was not going the distance. Her eyes riveted to the head of her
opponent, the world champion shook Goranova for the first time with
a left uppercut. After taking a count, the Bulgarian returned to the
fray, but the crowd by now was on fire.
"Anne-Sophie Mathis
seemed to be conserving her energy and didn't resume the attack
straight away. Without rushing, she was establishing a huge lead,
when the Bulgarian, driven into the corner by a series of blows, was
caught by a wicked right hook and pressed her knees to the canvas.
At this stage, though, she still wasn't beaten."
Goranova hung on, in
fact, for another round, and in the break between the third and
fourth rounds, René Cordier could be heard demanding greater
efficiency and accuracy from the world champion.
He got it. Goronova
got it too: the next round, a magnificent left hook knocked the
fight clean out of her. This time when she fell to her knees, she
meant it, and the posture of submission was maintained for the full
count of ten.
Sources: L'Est
Républicain, NetBoxe
Photo: Michel
Grosjean, Netboxe
The aphorism
« Plus ça change, plus c'est la
même chose »
(usually rendered as: "The more things change, the
more they remain the same") was coined by the French writer and
journalist Alphonse Carr (1808-1890)
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