The Fight Site Boxing Preview, February 18th
Photo by Nigel Roddis/Getty Images
Two potential firefights this week, as Leigh Wood defends his featherweight belt against Mauricio Lara in the UK, and then Luis Nery looks to regain some traction in his career by dropping back down to super-bantam against aggressive puncher Azat Hovhannisyan. Let’s take a look.
Leigh Wood vs Mauricio Lara
Featherweight
There’s not much chance this one will be quiet. We know Wood from his headline-grabbing victory over Michael Conlan last year, as he came back from early trouble to knock Conlan through the ropes and out in a contender for both Fight of the year and KO of the year. He’s earned his stardom the hard way, though, fighting a long and meandering career at British and European level before getting with Ben Davison a couple of years ago and polishing out some of the rough edges to make the jump to the world stage.
Lara, on the other hand, has not meandered. He burst out of nowhere to give Josh Warrington a beating when brought in to be a tune-up opponent back in 2021. The rematch ended in an unsatisfying clash of heads, and promotional shenanigans meant that Warrington ended up fighting for a title before Lara did (a title he has since lost). It’s possibly fair to say that there was an attempt to keep Lara meandering, as he struggled to tempt high-level opponents in with him last year, but Wood gave him the shot and, after an injury-based delay, they’re set to show down now.
Lara doesn’t meander in the ring, either. He’s not subtle; he just wants to get at his opponent and throw. In some ways that makes him crude, but not as much as it might appear, or- on recent evidence- even as much as he was against Warrington. For certain, he lacks defence when throwing, which gives Wood chances we’ll get to later. But when he throws he isn’t just windmilling- he picks his punches well and throws unorthodox shots that are hard to block or avoid. That makes him difficult to engage with, and he keeps up a good pace despite throwing every shot with maximum effort. In some ways he’s quite similar to his compatriot, Emanuel Navarette. The difference is that Navarette still overbalances all the time when chasing his opponents down, and Lara appears to have stopped doing that. So he’s a tough out.
Wood’s chances do still lie in using that aggression against him, though. If you were to take the second half of his fight against Conlan as a measure, you might think the plan is to meet Lara toe-to-toe, and that would go badly for him.
That was a desperate measure though. While by no means anything like a defensive fighter, Wood’s usual plan is to move at odd, janky angles, bait his opponents to throw, and catch them as they move with unorthodox shots of his own. It can get him into trouble- the early knockdown against Conlan came because he didn’t set his feet properly after moving and got caught on his heels. If that happens here, he’ll regret it.
However, when he gets it right, it gives him opportunities to land real power while his opponent is off-balance or walking forward. It can also take the edge of his opponents’ attacks, as he puts himself off the center line when he can, taking the sting off a lof of what they throw. He showed this best against Xu Can, when he won this belt. Can doesn’t throw half as hard as Lara, so he does have to be very careful, but he also doesn’t abandon all defence when throwing and still ended up walking onto a shot that eventually led to a knockout. If Lara can’t trap Wood into corners, he’ll be chasing him a lot, and if he bites too soon and starts throwing while Wood moves away, he’ll end up taking some very hard punches back.
It is, in short, a fight on something of a knife-edge. Don’t miss it.
Chief support comes from Dalton Smith defending his British 140lb belt against Billy Allington. Smith we know, one of UK boxing’s brightest prospects, a classy pressure fighter who likes to start low-key than crank the heat as the fight goes on. He combines slick pressure footwork and great accuracy with a nasty streak, so he’s usually entertaining. Allington is taking a big leap in level to be here, but he does look like a fighter who’ll at least bring the fight to Smith, which isn’t always the case, so that will be interesting.
We’ll also see Gary Cully, on a four-fight KO streak, step in with Wilfredo Flores. Beyond that, there’s a bunch of British-scene veterans in tune-up or keep-busy fights, including Kieron Conway, Gamal Yafai, and Sam Maxwell.
Luis Nery vs Azat Hovhannisyan
Super Bantamweight
Luis Nery has been one of boxing-head’s favourite villains down the years. He got into the bad books when he retired fan favourite Shinsuke Yamanaka in a controversial pair of fights, the first tainted by a positive drug test deemed officially accidental so not overturned, and the second by Nery not even bothering to try to make weight. He hasn’t really crossed any lines since then, but a perceived lack of discipline leading him to fight way above his natural weight at 118lbs hasn’t helped him recover that reputation, either.
He is, however, a perfectly solid and pretty entertaining world-class boxer. He’s a slick outboxer who likes to throw volume and makes enough mistakes to let opponents in, so he’s both dangerous and vulnerable. His power never quite seemed to carry to this super-bantamweight division, so that’ll be a factor, but he is, very definitely, going to be able to walk Hovhannisyan onto shots.
His problem is that, on top of the power, he does seem to struggle with stamina, or at least he did against the high-volume Brandon Figueroa in 2021. He was doing what he needed to do in the first half, which is to say consistently drawing Figueroa onto combinations and then getting away, not entirely clean, but without significant damage. He is a fighter who relies on the interruption his punches cause to maintain space, though, and he just couldn’t maintain the pace. Once he started to slow and Figueroa could get closer faster, he somewhat melted in the latter parts before a bodyshot put him down for the count. That is relevant here, because although Hovhannisyan is a little rougher around the edges than Figueroa, he’s similarly aggressive and high volume.
He’s also pretty unorthodox, and while in some ways that does mean ‘he does things wrong and can get caught’, it also means defensive moves that normally get Nery to a safe spot may not. That’d be fine if Nery was always switched on, but he does tend to relax when he gets to distance, and he can’t afford to here. That leaves the Armenian chances in and of itself, but it’ll also push Nery’s gas-tank even more, as it’ll be very difficult for him to maintain any kind of pace management.
Put simply, Hovhannisyan will be on Nery from the start, and Nery’s usual response to this is throw volume to get respect. Whether he should do that is open to question, but it’ll be entertaining for us as fans. This is a title eliminator, too, for the WBC belt currently held by Stephen Fulton but potentially soon by Naoya Inoue, so there’s a lot at stake.
It’s not a particularly strong undercard here, with the most notable name being Shane Mosley Jr, in against Mario Alberto Lozano, who loses almost every half-significant fight he gets in. There’s also Ricardo Rafael Sandoval, a prospect who found himself derailed by David Jimenez last year. He’s a tidy boxer, but this against Jerson Ortiz is very much a recovery fight.