An-Najah News - On Saturday night in Texas, the Mexican idol won 11 of the 12 rounds to take Callum Smith’s WBA super-middleweight title. It was a masterclass of precision, belief and desire. By the way, a whole stack of other belts was also on offer, but the tedium of listing the bauble haul is becoming a boxing curse.

Canelo was six or seven inches shorter, his reach is eight inches shorter, but he was able to give the previously unbeaten Smith a lesson in boxing humility, a textbook show of guile and power to ruin any physical advantages the man from Liverpool had. Smith had believed his size would be a factor, which was a decent assumption, and that his craft would be enough against Canelo’s wits. He was wrong and he knew it from very early in the fight. He had a torrid night in Texas, make no mistake.

It is a lesson that hurts as much as any punch and a lesson that is often harder to come back from than a knockout loss. Smith had no solutions, no magic tricks to counter Canelo’s brilliance and at the end, as he battled with his mixed emotions, he refused to hide behind a badly damaged left bicep. Smith is a real fighter, not a man for excuses. A two-armed Smith would have pushed more, but still not had enough to win.

 “He was very, very good tonight,” Smith said when his night was finished. He had that vacant look of confusion on his face and in his eyes; it is a look I have seen on the faces of the men that Canelo beats. It seems that the Mexican does things to you in the ring that you never imagined, things you believed that you were safe from. He hurts your confidence badly, takes away your faith and hits you with every shot from both hands. And he hurts. “He’s the best fighter on the planet,” said Eddie Hearn, the fight’s co-promoter, at the end. Hearn sounded as awed as Smith looked; that’s the Canelo way.