Did Valero Prove Anything in Beating Pitalua?

By Manuel Perez: I for one wasn’t the least impressed with the new World Boxing Council lightweight champion Edwin Valero’s (25-0, 25 KOs) recent 2nd round knockout over 39-year-old Antonio Pitalua (46-4, 40 KOs) last Saturday night at the Frank Erwin Center, in Austin, Texas. Valero looked slow, very hittable and not as hard hitting as his record suggests. He caught Pitalua with a right hook at the start of the 2nd round and put him down.

It wasn’t a case of him being pounded into the turf with monstrous shots round after round, but rather a case of him being hit with a shot he wasn’t expecting. After he got up, Pitalua was in bad shape and would have been knocked out by anyone at this point.

All Valero had to do was hit him with a few choice shots and he was gone, which is exactly what Valero did. He opened up with a flurry of punches and put Pitalua down for good at 0:49 of the 2nd round. But I can’t give Valero much credit for the victory because of how bad he looked and how old his opponent.

For Christ’s sakes, he beat a guy that was nearly for 40-years-old, and he should have been able to beat. Where’s the victory in beating a guy that old? Beyond the age factor of Valero’s opponent, it was just another case of him fighting someone that was below his level.

That’s the main criticism about Valero. I mean, sure he gets all these nice knockouts but look at who he’s fighting. I don’t want to knock him at his moment of so-called glory but come on, he hasn’t faced the best of opponents at this point in his seven year career.

If you were to pick Valero’s best opponent to date, I’d have to say it was super featherweight Vincente Mosquera, who Valero knocked out in the 10th round in August 2006. Mosquera’s a decent fighter, but he’ll never be mistaken for Manny Pacquiao, Juan Manuel Marquez or Juan Diaz.

As it turns out, Mosquera gave Valero huge problems in the fight, knocking him down in the 3rd round and hitting him often with big right hands and left hooks. Valero was eventually able to stop him, but it was fight that was closely contested until the very end.

It wasn’t a slaughter, and minus the knockout victory, it would have been a close decision for Valero. For me, that suggests that Valero isn’t all that good. I’ve seen half a dozen of Valero’s other fights and he’s looked just as beatable there as he did in the Mosquera fight, the difference being that he was fighting much easier opponents than Mosquera.

After last Saturday nights fight, Valero mentioned that he would be open to fighting Ricky Hatton in the future. I think that’s a positively terrible idea. Valero hasn’t fought anyone good enough to even suggest that he would be capable of beating someone as good as Hatton.

In a way, the opponents that Valero has faced in his career, reminds me a lot of the kind of fighters that Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. has faced as well.

Chavez Jr. is also unbeaten, and for me, his record has the same value as Valero’s. He’s got a lot of wins and knockouts over fighters that are not particularly good. However, you don’t even need to look at Valero’s record to tell that he’s possibly not what people think he is.

I can just look at him and tell that he would be blown out by fighters like Marquez, Hatton, Diaz, Nate Campbell, Amir Khan and even Breidis Prescott. If you really want to test how good Valero is, why not put him in against one of those fighters.

Yeah, I know he’d probably never get a chance at fighting Khan, because his handlers wouldn’t risk it, but I think Campbell, Marquez, Diaz and Prescott would jump at a chance to fight someone like Valero.

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