By Ronnie Nathanielsz

World Boxing Organization vice president for Asia Pacific Leon Panoncillo has praised newly crowned flyweight champion Brian Viloria for his courage in hammering out a twelve round unanimous decision against hard-hitting Mexican champion Julio Cesar “Pingo” Miranda at the Blaisdell Arena last Sunday, Manila Time.

Panoncillo who was appointed fight supervisor by WBO president Francisco “Paco” Valcarcel told krikya360.com/Daily Inquirer that the flyweight showdown was “a great fight and Brian proved to be worthy of himself as he took everything that Miranda could give and returned fire.”

Panoncillo said Viloria “sure had enough in his championship heart that once again made him a world champion.”

At the same time Panoncillo criticized the ring announcer who messed up reading the scorecards after the Viloria-Miranda fight saying “whoever hired the ring announcer made a big mistake. He really did not know how scoring is usually read and that made it a very awkward situation. Even how the undercard was read was not right.”

He said the Hawaii Boxing Commission “requires that their scorecard to be read instead of our WBO scoresheet that has the twelve complete rounds. That made it confusing for the ring announcer because the Hawaiian Commission has two score sheets that they need to complete the scoring of each judge.”

The WBO official said the ring announcer was “not informed by the commission and did not know that he had to read the second sheet with the complete scoring of the twelve rounds and he read only the first commission score sheer that had only listed up to ten completed rounds. He did not realize that he should have read the second sheet which had the scoring at the end of twelve rounds.”

Panoncillo said he had the mistake corrected.