Jonas celebrates her huge victory. (Photograph by Ian Hodgson/PA Photos through Getty Photos)
One other nice weekend of motion in a historic month of November for ladies’s boxing yielded some attention-grabbing outcomes and some actions in our Ladies’s Rankings.
In crucial struggle of the week, “Miss GB” Natasha Jonas lifted the Ring junior middleweight belt left behind by Claressa Shields resulting from inactivity within the division, and he or she did so impressively sufficient to make an much more necessary bounce, making her debut within the pound-for-pound score at No. 10 due to her strong win over the previous No. 1 within the division, Canada’s Marie Eve Dicaire.
“Jonas used her intelligence towards Dicaire on this conflict of southpaws,” mentioned writer Yesica Palmetta. “Natasha Jonas, regardless of being just a few inches shorter in peak, moved as if she had been taller (than Dicaire) for many of the struggle.”
Lupi Gutierrez-Beagle agreed by saying that “Jonas seemed a lot smaller than DiCaire, but managed to search out each opening to DiCaire’s physique and face,” whereas historian Malissa Smith mentioned that “Jonas did job holding DiCaire at bay and had a clear win. She’ll have to work on stamina within the later rounds to maneuver her sport ahead, however in any other case, she is continuous her marketing campaign in direction of an undisputed crown for the 154-pound division.”
For all of the reward on Jonas’ work, there have been dissenting voices when it got here to demoting Marshall in favor of fellow Brit celebrity Jonas within the P4P rankings, with veteran ladies’s boxing scribe Thomas Gerbasi saying that “(Marshall) was in a really aggressive struggle with a fellow pound-for-pounder. That doesn’t deserve a drop. Jonas had a fantastic yr, however not sufficient to get into the P4P rankings.”
With Jonas’ new standing as junior middleweight champion, Dicaire was demoted to No. 2 in favor of former Jonas foe Terri Harper, who now closes in on Jonas to start out forcing a rematch of their spirited draw again in 2020.
“Terri Harper backed (Jonas) up two years in the past, and Marie Eve Decaire completed the identical on Saturday,” mentioned columnist Mark Jones, anticipating what can be a really enticing rematch between the 2, who’ve been at it on Twitter for some time now making an attempt to impress a second struggle. “That doesn’t bode properly when she fights larger opponents like Claressa Shields or Mary Spencer, however (Jonas) and others have made the junior middleweight division respectable.”
With a brand new champion, the No. 5 place turned vacant, and Scotland’s Hannah Rankin was welcomed again into the Prime 5 to occupy this place with one other unanimous vote.
Elsewhere, two separate fights that featured the participation of two pound-for-pound entrants ended up producing some motion within the legendary score as properly.
Within the junior light-weight division, Delfine Persoon had an anticlimactic ending in a struggle she was clearly dominating, when she punched her foe Ikram Kerwat whereas she was down, turning what was on its option to turning into a stoppage win right into a no-contest.
Within the strawweight division, Seniesa Estrada dominated a feisty and fearless Jazmin Villarino to defend her belt and cement her place as probably the greatest decrease weight fighters of at this time – and on her option to turning into an all-time nice.
The mixture of outcomes (Estrada surging and looking out higher and higher with each struggle, and Persoon failing to safe high-profile bouts and even wanting good in pedestrian ones) led the panel to unanimously resolve {that a} swap between their positions can be a good suggestion.
Thus, Estrada moved as much as No. 6 whereas Persoon dropped to No. 7.
Even those that identified on the caveat implied in Persoon’s motion have been in favor of the transfer.
“Ikram Kerwat had no enterprise within the ring with an all-time nice like Delfine Persoon,” mentioned Jones, “so the truth that she was knocked out wasn’t a shock. The punch Persoon landed on Kerwat whereas she was down was thrown within the warmth of the struggle, so the “no contest” name was correct. Jazmin Villarino wass a straightforward mark for Estrada, however she gave a spirited effort and is much superior to Kerwat.”
Japan’s Yuriko Miyata was the only real voice of dissent when she mentioned that “although (Estrada) confirmed her expertise as all the time, I don’t assume it was a struggle to boost her larger in P4P.”
Diego M. Morilla has written for The Ring since 2013. He has additionally written for HBO.com, ESPN.com and plenty of different magazines, web sites, newspapers and shops since 1993. He’s a full member of the Boxing Writers Affiliation of America and an elector for the Worldwide Boxing Corridor of Fame. He has received two first-place awards within the BWAA’s annual writing contest, and he’s the moderator of The Ring’s Ladies’s Rankings Panel. He served as copy editor for the second period of The Ring en Español (2018-2020) and is presently a author and editor for RingTV.com.
