Daniel Roman scored a big stoppage victory against arguably his toughest challenger to date.
On the opening fight of the main card of Matchroom Boxing USA’s first boxing card streamed on DAZN, Roman stopped Gavin McDonnell in the 10th round to retain his WBA super bantamweight world title.
Roman started the fight well, connecting with big punches on the inside, negating McDonnell’s height advantage which was around four inches. McDonnell landed his jab moderately well throughout the first half of the fight, but did not land anything big that would have put the champion in danger. Roman continued to land multiple big right hands upstairs around the midway portion of the fight.
In the seventh and eighth round, however, McDonnell started to outbox Roman and made the fight competitive for only a short time. Roman did catch his second wind and knocked down McDonnell with a straight right hand in the 10th round, eventually stopping him.
The win was Roman’s third title defense since winning the WBA “regular” title against Shun Kubo in 2017. Since that win over Kubo, Roman would get elevated to full world champion due to “super” champion Guillermo Rigondeaux being stripped of his version of the title. Roman has defended his title three times this year, winning unanimous decisions against Ryo Matsumoto and Moises Flores and now a stoppage victory against McDonnell.
In an interview after the fight, Roman stated that he would want to fight either WBC champion Rey Vargas or WBO champion Isaac Dogboe in a unification fight.
