Boxing Preview, 19/20 November

The highlight of the weekend is of course Terence Crawford’s defence of his WBO title against Shawn Porter, Crawford’s toughest fight since he moved up to Welterweight in 2018, but we also have Middleweight champion Demetrius Andrade topping a very solid card on Friday, plus a decent British show on Saturday too. Let’s have a look card by card.

Crawford vs. Porter, 20th November

This fight is widely seen as a much-needed test for Terence Crawford, who looked sensational and earned a spot on most p4p top 10s rising up the divisions and unifying 140lbs, but who hasn’t fought someone he could consider a real challenge since he took that step up and won the WBO 147 belt against Jeff Horn in 2018. Porter has fallen short a few times at the very top level but he’s made it a torrid time for everyone he’s been in the ring with, including Crawford’s big rival Errol Spence back in 2019.

Style-wise, Porter’s most known for being a mauling, bullrushing, clinch-heavy sort of a fighter. He doesn’t always do this — he mostly boxed and moved in his controversial win over Yordenis Ugas for example - but you’d have to think it’s his best approach here, and his comments about breaking Crawford’s rhythm indicate he thinks so too. He’ll be coming in fast, playing it rough, trying to smother Crawford’s work in positions in close where he himself is comfortable.

The problem with that, though, is that the idea of Bud having a readable and breakable rhythm doesn’t really fly — if anything, it’s the opposite of true. Throughout his career if he has one defining feature of his game that makes him stand out from the other p4p contenders, it’s his ability to set up one pattern that his opponents begin to follow, and then punishing them by doing something else, raising the tempo, switching a stance, generally introducing new wrinkles and then capitalising on the resultant confusion in the meanest ways.

That suggests what the story of the fight will be — Porter may well have some success early, and thereafter intermittently, but between the two of them it’ll be Crawford leading the dance in terms of making changes that give him an advantage, and Porter will be playing a chasing game. Since some of those changes are likely to be stepping off to make Porter fall short, I can see the fight ending when Porter overreaches to close that gap and ends up leaning into a well-timed counter.

The chief support on this card comes in the form of of an IBF eliminator at middleweight. Brazilian Esquiva Falcão is a former amateur standout, winning a silver medal at the 2012 Olympics, but his career since turning pro has not been impressive. He took a step up in prominence in an odd victory in June against Artur Akavov (a between-rounds retirement that seemed to come out of nowhere), and will be hoping that a mandatory position for the IBF belt gives him some openings to make career moves. Although untested as a pro, he looks like a tidy operator, a precise and tidy puncher with a neat manipulation of rhythm and space. Once he steps up to world level, a defence largely reliant on timing and positioning will be tested, but he’s unlikely to find that test against Volny, a 32 year old regional Canadian who does put punches together once he’s close but doesn’t seem to have any real form of defence nor any subtlety about getting close. Falcão should pick him apart.

A bit more interesting is another middleweight clash, this one featuring classy Kazakh middleweight Zhanibek Alimkhanuly against the veteran Hassan N’Dam. Although he’s definitely been brought in to give Alimkhanuly — who looked excellent in defeating Rob Brant earlier in the year — a bit of a reputation polish by fighting someone who’s been in with big names, N’dam, returning to 160 after a torrid time at 165, won’t be there to lie down. Alimkhanuly’s technical precision, power and patient pressing should be too much for him, but there is an opening for a looping overhand right, a punch N’dam is good at throwing, if the younger man gets sloppy with his head movement behind a low lead hand. 

Andrade vs. Quigley, 19th November

Demetrius Andrade has been a champion for a long time at two weights and yet still has an awful lot left to prove. Part of the problem is that he’s just not a very exciting boxer, for the most part a point-picking range fighter who does odd things when the fight gets in closer, and who relies on speed to cover for mistakes he makes. The rest is that much of his resume consists of opponents either drawn from regional scenes directly or who have already faced and lost to other world class fighters. Jason Quigley won’t change that — he’s never even fought a 12 rounder before. The problem, for us viewers, comes in guessing who is going to engage. Andrade doesn’t like to, much — he’s known for it. Quigley did spend much of his most recent fight, against Shane Mosley Jr, walking his man down and throwing combinations, but he’s more often been a backfoot jab-heavy fighter himself, so it’s hard to know if that change will stick. Realistically, Andrade should win very comfortably at distance whether the Irishman chooses to chase in a style less natural to him, or try to fight for range with the faster guy, but Quigley does have some nice slick accuracy to his punches whether going backwards or forwards, so there could be a little test here. Maybe.

The real appeal of this card is below the headliner, with two more world title fights. First let’s look at the flyweight match, where Mexican wrecking machine Julio Cesar Martinez takes on the Puetro Rican veteran McWilliams Arroyo to defend his WBC title. Arroyo has typically in the past fallen short when facing elite competition in the past, though he does have a 2018 win over Carlos Cuadras to his name. He’s a little basic, sometimes a little scruffy, but well-rounded, sharp, and always ready to bite down and fight, which is handy, because Martinez will make him. The Mexican has mostly been devastating since breaking into the spotlight by devastating Andrew Selby and then daftly costing himself a similarly blowout victory by nailing Charlie Edwards while he was on a knee. He’s almost cartoonishly aggressive at times, yet has some underrated craft, especially in how he finds space to deliver his punches, little side-steps and angles combining with a big and unpredictable arsenal to make him very hard to defend against. His defence is a little ropier though, consisting mostly of hoping his opponent is too intimidated to throw much and with a high guard for emergencies, and that’s where Arroyo, who’s not a lot more subtle but is a lot more responsible, while also not being shy of punching with his opponent (even when it’s the great Chocolatito Gonzalez), will find his chances. The champion will be the rightful favourite, but this could be fight of the night and, if we’re lucky, we might be looking at a fight of the year contender. 

The third title fight is uneven on paper, with the well-schooled Uzbek champion Murodjon Akhmadaliev taking on late Covid replacement Jose Velasquez, a Chilean who got two 32 years and 37 fights (29 wins, 6 losses — all very early on) fighting mostly regionally in South America. You wouldn’t expect this to be an upset or even go the distance, with Velasquez being the much smaller man — at just over 5 foot 2 he’d be small in any division… but he’s very, very aggressive, and while that might and probably will get him in trouble against the cool, precise and rangy champion even if his defence is craftier than it initially looks, it suggests we’ll get a fun scrap while it does happen. As thrown-together last-minuters go, it’s better than many, and Velasquez will be itching to grab some attention win or lose on this stage.

Riakporhe vs. Durudola, 20th November

This fight is one of those strange ones to judge where it’s very hard to judge the relative levels as it stands of the two fighters. Durodola is vastly more experienced, but also 41. He hasn’t won an internationally relevant fight since beating Dmitry Kudryashov in 2015 (a matchup he’s since lost a rematch of) but he’s kept busy on the African scene (fights that it’s difficult to judge because even where footage exists, context for how good the opponents are is hard to come by) and been reasonably competitive as recently as 2020 against Ilunga Makabu, still a high-level cruiserweight champion (and as we’ve just heard, Saul Alvarez’s next target).

Riakporhe hasn’t fought at anywhere near that kind of level, and although he’s unbeaten till now he’s looked pretty ropey on a few occasions, needing comeback KOs against Jack Massey and Tommy McCarthy and more recently winning messy decisions against Chris Billam-Smith, Jack Massey and Krzysztof Twardowski.
Stylistically, Durodola’s age might not come into it as much as we think since Riakporhe, although capable of being fast, usually isn’t, preferring to rumble forward throwing big clubbing shots and then fall into the clinch. That might be his mistake here, since although he likes to do this, he isn’t particularly good at it, and Durudola, who’s been in with much, much better clinchers may well punish him for it. It is fair to say that in his most recent fight against Krzysztow Twardowksi, after a two-year injury break, he did add a new trick of throwing his jab out for a reaction then timing shots behind it, and also boxed on the back foot a bit, but he’s going to have to be much better with that jab (and with his defence in general, he took a lot of shots that night) for that to work against Durudola. I’ve picked against Riakporhe and been wrong before, and we certainly can’t discount Durudola’s age, but we could be looking at the Brit biting off a little more than he can chew here.

The co-main here is a light heavyweight showdown for the British belt between Hosea Burton and Dan Azeez. Although similar in age — 33 and 32 respectively — Burton is a lot more experienced. His career did stall for several years between losing to Frank Buglioni the last time he went for this belt in 2016 and coming back to this sort of level in 2019/20 though, so the gap isn’t quite as big as the numbers make it appear. He’s still fought far more at British/European level than Azeez, but he’s also fallen short there twice, so Azeez may well take confidence from that.

Burton is a rangy punch-picker with some decent timing but a proneness to unravelling under pressure if that timing fails him. Azeez isn’t likely to really press, being an in-and-out sort of boxer, but he throws volume and never likes to let an opponent’s shot go unanswered, so Burton’s flusterability may well come into play. On the other hand, he might just get caught jumping in and out — this is a tough one to call and could be a fun one.

Also on the card is Florian Marku, a fun and confident, if slightly open, Albanian building a name for himself as an action fighter on the British welterweight scene, and the luckless cruiswerweight Mikael Lawal, who should have fought a British belt eliminator some time ago but has seen fight after fight fall apart on him, including what was already a rescheduled fight against Steven Ward on this card. As a result, he’s fighting his second late replacement in just over a month — this time Italian Leonardo Bruzzese — but he’s a fun fighter with some talent and worth keeping an eye on.

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Lukasz Fenrych