Egidijus Kavaliauskas earns draw with Ray Robinson in disappointing performance

Welterweight contender Egidijus Kavaliauskas remains undefeated tonight, but he didn’t win either, earning a majority draw with Ray Robinson after 10 rounds of action on ESPN. Kavaliauskas seemed to have a really lackluster performance, and the judges turned in scores of 97-93 for Robinson, and two cards of 95-95. BLH also had the rounds split after 10 rounds, with a draw looking like a fair result.

Kavaliauskas was looking to put on a performance that could land him a fight with Terence Crawford, but this wasn’t the performance he probably hoped for. Kavaliauskas (21-0-1, 17 KOs) started the fight slowly with Robinson (24-3-1, 12 KOs) keeping him off balance with constant lateral movement and long shots from the outside. Then, when Robinson’s legs started to tire, Kavaliauskas started coming on and landing some big shots, but he never took the initiative to really step on the gas and pour it on.

So by the later rounds Robinson still had enough in the tank to keep the fight on the outside and do just enough to keep Kavaliauskas off of him, even if he wasn’t inflicting much damage with his own punches.

In the post-fight interview Kavaliauskas said he wasn’t happy with the performance, but that if the judges saw it as a draw then he wasn’t going to argue with it. Robinson, however, was adamant that should’ve won the fight tonight, and that Kavaliauskas proved that he isn’t ready to take on someone like Crawford since he had such difficulty dealing with lateral movement and outside boxing (which is a credible point after seeing tonight’s fight).

Final CompuBox stats had Kavaliauskas landing 88 of 432 total punches (20.4%) while Robinson landed only 70 of 527 total punches (13.3%). These stats are pretty indicative of how little clean punching there was in the fight altogether.