Naoya Inoue and Junto Nakatani don’t need to run it back with a rematch because of bad scoring, bad refereeing, or any extravagant controversy.
In fact, the judges scored Inoue’s decision win quite well, referee Robert Hoyle did a fine job with little reason to get involved much at all, and there is no reason to shout too much about what we saw.
But there are questions that remain. And a big one centers on an accidental clash of heads in the 10th round, which opened up a cut over the eye of Nakatani,
and gave Inoue what looked to be a much-needed chance to catch his breath.
Nakatani (32-1, 24 KO) had been coming on strong. The lead Inoue (33-0, 27 KO) had built in the first half was narrowing. The momentum was with Nakatani, the younger man, and he was starting to look really confident. Inoue, meanwhile, was looking more questionable than I can ever recall. Even going back to his tremendous war with Nonito Donaire in 2019, I can’t remember seeing Inoue look so much like he’d lost the control of a fight, like he was fighting on someone else’s terms, like he was worried.
One little clash of heads. The blood got into Nakatani’s eye and it definitely bothered him. And Inoue was allowed a chance to take a breath, reset, and dig in.
Now don’t take it all way from Inoue by any means, because he did dig in, and finished the fight strong, sealing the win in the 11th and 12th rounds. But there’s a different scenario today where maybe we come out with a majority draw, or maybe even Nakatani keeps coming on so strong that Inoue hits the deck. Inoue’s been down before. He’s not indestructible.
And like many of the great fights pitting a pair of great fighters, that’s one of the things made very clear about both combatants. Anyone, in a truly top-level fight, can be hurt, can struggle, can lose the fight. And in a case like this where the lights weren’t too bright for either man, what that tells you is that the fighters truly are special. They’re elite.
Naoya Inoue is still elite. Junto Nakatani has proven as much today in defeat as he has in any of his wins. We luckily seem to be getting past the dreadful era where a loss, even in a high-end matchup, saw a fighter treated, by fans and some pundits, like they were never any good in the first place, and today’s fight was a great reminder of why that should never be the case.
Junto Nakatani lost today. But he proved how good he is. He had Inoue thinking things Inoue has never thought before, at least that I’ve seen, at least not so visibly.
There should be a rematch, and it’s simply because the fight was that good, and I suspect a second one might be even better. Nakatani might not start out so tight. Both will make adjustments. Maybe a clash of heads, which is just something that happens in boxing, doesn’t change the fight’s tone.
Maybe today, Naoya Inoue was a little bit lucky. But that’s life, and the man may have at the same time given himself a career-best argument to be considered the sport’s best pound-for-pound fighter. While Oleksandr Usyk prepares to fight a kickboxer in another of boxing’s overhyped novelty matchups, Inoue was taking on arguably the most significant challenge of his career.
There are questions remaining about Inoue vs Nakatani. Good ones. The type that make you wonder if this could have gone just a bit differently, and the type that make you want to see them do it again. Because they’re great, and you just don’t get too many matchups with these sorts of possibilities.
