By Peter Lim

If the bookmakers' odds (and mere common sense) for Golovkin vs. Murray are any indication as to the outcome of the bout, it seems almost a forgone conclusion that it will be a rout for Kazakhstan over England in this battle. In cases like this, the suspense of a fight stems not from who will win, but when and how.

Fighting with an eclectic mix of patience and power, Golovkin (31-0, 28 KOs) stopped his last eight opponents between rounds 2 and 8, but the knockouts never unfurled the same way. He flattened Marco Antonio Rubio with a haymaker left hook to the temple. Against Daniel Geale and Nobuhiro Ishida, neither of whom had previously been stopped, the fight-ending punch was the right to the head. And he crumpled Mathew Macklin for the full count with a bone-shattering left hook to the ribcage. Which weapon will be most effective against Murray?

The beauty of boxing, though, is that you can never count the underdog out, no matter how insurmountable the odds. According to most bookmakers, Murray (29-1-1,12 KOs) averages a 1-in-38 chance of defeating Golovkin, a tad higher than the 1-in-42 chance Buster Douglas faced when he took on the supposedly-indestructible Mike Tyson in Tokyo in 1990. Look what happened there.

Read this writer's prediction at peterliminator.blogspot.com.