By Jim Dower: After losing his last two fights to Kelly Pavlik, super middleweight Jermain Taylor (27-2, 17 KOs) will be hoping to get back on the winning track on Saturday night against WBC #4 ranked super middleweight Jeff Lacy (24-1, 17 KOs) in a 12-round WBC Super Middleweight Title Eliminator match at Vanderbilt University Memorial Gymnasium, in Nashville, Tennessee.

Despite the two recent losses to Pavlik, both Taylor and Lacy appear to be going in different directions. Whereas Taylor is still fighting well, as he showed in coming close to beating Pavlik in February, Lacy has struggled since losing a 12-round decision to Joe Calzaghe in 2006. A serious injury to his left shoulder has taken much of the power off of Lacy’s once powerful left hook, and made him have to rely more on his right hand to take up the slack.

The good news, though, is that Lacy’s right hand has proved to be very good, albeit not nearly as good as his left hook. But, Lacy’s stamina has shown to be a problem in his last two bouts, close decisions wins over Peter Manfredo Jr. and Epifanio Mendoza. In both fights, Lacy started off strong, throwing big power shots and putting both opponents under a lot of pressure.

However, as the fights progressed, Lacy wore out badly, his power on his shots diminishing rapidly in each subsequent round until he was throwing more arm punches than power shots. Lacy was hurt badly by Mendoza in the 8th round, and had to resort to taking him down with a hard tackle in order to buy some time and prevent from being knocked down.

Later in the round, Lacy was hurt again by a right hand and staggered. Lacy would fight the remainder of the bout on the defensive, taking big shots from Mendoza and looking like a shadow of his former self. In the end, Lacy ended up pulling out a close 10-round majority decision, but it was far from an impressive performance by him.

This was an opponent that Lacy should have easily beat, as Mendoza isn’t a top tier super middleweight and is mostly a slugger with crude skills. However, Lacy looked barely better than him, and for many boxing fans, they saw the fight as a draw. If this were the only time that Lacy looked bad, I’m sure he could be excused for it.

But Lacy has struggled in bouts against Manfredo and Vitali Tsypko. The fight against Tsypko saw Lacy get injured early on, tearing up his left rotator cuff in the 2nd round, and fighting poorly for the remainder of the bout. Because of that, Lacy’s bad performance against him can be excused, but it still was a bad performance nonetheless, following his loss to Calzaghe.

Many boxing fans are writing Lacy off, and see him as a shot fighter who will be defeated easily by Taylor on Saturday night. Indeed, this could turn out to be a big mismatch, because Taylor is a huge leap up in competition in comparisons to fighters like Mendoza, Manfredo and Tsypko.

If Lacy isn’t able to fight above the level that he showed against those fighters, this could turn out to be a very early night for him. Lacy’s going to have to be letting his hands go as early possible, hoping he can catch Taylor with a big shot or else I see Taylor winning this fight with ease.