Martin Murray told John Dennen about his experience with Gennady Golovkin

EARLIER this year Martin Murray became the first man to take the fearsome Gennady Golovkin into the 11th round. The Kazakh is renowned for his punching and Murray told Boxing News what makes “GGG” so effective.

“He’s just good at everything. Obviously he punches hard. He takes a shot well. He’s quite sneaky defensively as well but what surprised me most about Golovkin was the variety of his shots. The way he opened me up. We worked a lot on his left hook to the body, cancelling that out. He never landed it once, we worked that much on it,” Martin said. “If you want to beat Golovkin you’ve got to stay in the centre of the ring and push him back. The thing about him, he’s a good all-rounder. Everything he does, he does well and does world class. That’s what makes him special. Like I said what surprised me about him was his variety.

“I remember being in close with him and then he’s hit me with a left uppercut, ripped my nose right back and I thought, ‘Bastard.’ It was when my nose went. I was thinking, ‘He’s going to go to the body now, left hook to the body.’ But he hit me with the left uppercut again. I thought, ‘He’s got to go downstairs now’ and I put my arm down and he hit me with the left uppercut again. Proper rammed it up three times.”

“He hits hard, the hardest I’ve ever been hit, but I was expecting more. I don’t know if that was because how anticipated he was, because I was thinking all kinds leading up to this fight, mentally preparing myself for torture. Which it was to be fair,” Murray continued. “But I was mentally preparing myself for being hit a lot harder. So when he did hit me – hard, strong, thudding – it came as a nice surprise.”