He promised a stoppage that he couldn’t deliver – but there is only one culprit for that, and that’s his foe and his granite chin.

After dropping dozens of bombs during the fight – and a few F-bombs in the post-fight comments – Tim Tszyu remained undefeated and well on his way to a junior middleweight world title fight with a 12-round unanimous decision over Japan’s Takeshi Inoue at the Qudos Bank Arena in Sydney, Australia on Wednesday, Nov. 17.

Fighting in front of a loud partisan crowd in his homeland, Tszyu (20-0, 15 knockouts) scored a shutout on all three cards, with the addition of a 12^th round knockdown that gave him an extra edge to secure scorecards of 120-107 (twice) and 119-108.

Punch statistics wouldn’t do justice to his performance.

“This guy’s built like a f***ing brick wall,” said Tszyu in the ring after the fight, in which he landed numbing body punches in large quantities against a foe that simply wouldn’t go down, giving the Australian-born son of former Russian/Australian champ Kostya Tszyu the chance to go the full 12-round distance for the first time in his career.

Body punches and uppercuts were the weapons of choice for the 27-year-old Tszyu, who found an easy target on the bulking Inoue (no relation to either Naoya or Takuma), an athlete with a physique more built for endurance than for speed and explosiveness.

Inoue, 31, suffered a cut in his lip and a knockdown in the final round, but was otherwise unharmed in a fight in which he received a frightening amount of punishment.

Immediately after the fight, Tszyu renewed his calls to face Argentina’s Brian Castaño (17-0-1, 12 KOs) in what looms as the ultimate Southern Hemisphere neighborhood clash in all of boxing, for Castaño’s WBO trinket.

“I want anybody,” said Tszyu. “Let’s f***ing do this!”

Inoue returned to Japan with a still respectable 17-2-1 (10 KOs) record, with his only other loss being at the hands of Mexico’s Jaime Munguia with a junior middleweight title at stake in 2019.