Principality Stadium, Cardiff, Wales - WBA bantamweight champion Ryan Burnett (19-0, 9 KOs) dominated Yonfrez Parejo (21-3-1, 10 KOs) over twelve rounds of action to win a unanimous decision.
The judges scored it 120-118, 120-118 and 116-112. Burnett believes that he broke his right hand in the third round.
The fight was part of the undercard to the heavyweight unification between Anthony Joshua and Joseph Parker.
Burnett is coming back from his big twelve round decision win over Zhanat Zhakiyanov from last October to unify the WBA, IBF bantamweight world titles. A few months following the contest, Burnett vacated the IBF title in order to avoid a mandatory order to face Emmanuel Rodriguez of Puerto Rico.
One of Parejo's two defeats came at the hands of Zhakiyanov by way of a close twelve round split decision back in October of 2015 in Monaco. He's won four straight following that defeat. The other loss was a knockout defeat, which came to dangerous puncher and former world champion Hugo Ruiz.
Burnett started very strong in the first few rounds, as he was outboxing Parejo in the contest. Parejo became more lively during the third round, as he was trying to make it a fight. Burnett was more than happy to accept his invitation and was outworking him and using defensive maneuvers to make Parejo miss often. Burnett was actually taunting Parejo to engage him in a brawl, but the Venezuelan boxer would not accept the invitation.
The speed and reflexes of Burnett was on display and presenting a lot of trouble to Parejo. During the seventh round, Burnett suffered a cut over his left eye from a clash of heads. He tasted few issues from the injury and continued to outbox his challenger. Another for Parejo was his inactivity, as he wasn't busy enough to nick any of the close rounds and there wasn't much urgency from him to go for the win.
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