Britain’s Hamzah Sheeraz made a successful step up to super middleweight with a destructive fifth-round stoppage victory against Edgar Berlanga in New York.<\/b><\/p>\n
In the other co-main event, Shakur Stevenson retained his WBC lightweight world title with a unanimous decision victory over William Zepeda.<\/p>\n
Sheeraz, 26, knocked Berlanga down twice in the fourth round and again at the start of the fifth to force the referee to end the fight.<\/p>\n
The impressive victory improves Sheeraz’s record to 22-0, with one draw and 18 wins inside the distance.<\/p>\n
It was the Briton’s first fight since that draw – against WBC middleweight champion Carlos Adames in February – after which he decided to make the step up to super middleweight.<\/p>\n
Berlanga’s record is now 23-2 after a second defeat in three fights, with March’s stoppage of Jonathan Gonzalez-Ortiz preceded by a unanimous points defeat by Saul ‘Canelo’ Alvarez.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Stevenson comfortably won on all three judges’ scorecards against Zepeda to make a third defence of his WBC lightweight title.<\/p>\n
Two judges scored the bout 118-110 and a third saw it 119-109 for the 28-year-old American, who improved his unbeaten record to 24-0 with 11 knockouts.<\/p>\n
It was a first career defeat for Mexican Zepeda, 29, whose record is now 33-1.<\/p>\n
The card was held at the Louis Armstrong Stadium, one of the show courts at Flushing Meadows, host venue of the US Open tennis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Britain’s Hamzah Sheeraz made a successful step up to super middleweight with a destructive fifth-round stoppage victory against…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":261388,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4108],"tags":[1935,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-261387","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boxing","8":"tag-boxing","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114845555251735929","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=261387"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261387\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/261388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=261387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=261387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=261387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}