Mundine Wants to Unify the Middleweight Division

By Eric Thomas: In the latest boxing news, newly crowned IBO middleweight champion Anthony Mundine is reportedly interested in unifying the middleweight division after his hard-earned 12-round split decision over fellow Australian Daniel Geale on Thursday night in Australia.

Mundine, 34, is looking at going after WBC/WBO world middleweight champion Kelly Pavlik next or possibly WBA middleweight champion Felix Sturm, whichever one shows the most interest in fighting Mundine first. Mundine has done part of the job of unifying the titles already by winning the obscure IBO title. However, as the saying goes, ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day,’ and Mundine has time to get the other titles in the year.

By going after the 26-year-old Pavlik, Mundine could position himself to pick up two of the belts immediately should he defeat Pavlik and win his WBC and WBO boxing titles. Getting fights with IBF middleweight champion Arthur Abraham and Sturm, though, would likely be much tougher for Mundine to accomplish, because Sturm and Abraham’s management team are very selective in choosing their opponents.

And unless Mundine were to become a mandatory challenger for either of them, it’s highly unlikely that Mundine could get a fight with either of them regardless of whether or not Mundine were able to defeat Pavlik.

However, first things first, Mundine needs to try and get a fight with Pavlik so that Mundine can try to accomplish what would likely be the toughest task of all. Pavlik is probably a shade better than Abraham right now, and a lot better than the weak-punching, jab only, Sturm.

For Mundine to beat Pavlik, he’ll have to look a lot better against him than he did in his fight with Geale. In that fight, Mundine had problems with Geale’s high work rate and found himself losing a lot of rounds because he was getting out-landed by the younger Geale.

However, Mundine scored a flash knockdown in the 2nd and then after losing many of the middle rounds, came on in the last three rounds, winning the 10, 11th and 12th rounds by taking the fight to the weary Geale and landing more punches than him for the first time in the fight.

I think Pavlik might be too powerful for Mundine to beat at this point, because Mundine would likely try to go right at Pavlik, which would be a big mistake in my estimation. Pavlik has much better power than Mundine, and although Pavlik isn’t as fast as him, he would land enough heavy shots to cause Mundine to back off and fight passively like he did against Mikkel Kessler in his loss to him.

Mundine will need to spar more with Roy Jones Jr. so he can pick up more of his game before taking on a fighter like Pavlik. Sturm would also be a problem for Mundine due to his outstanding jab. Sturm has an excellent ability to block punches and probably wouldn’t be bothered by Mundine’s right hands.

The way to beat Sturm is to fight on the inside against him and pound him with uppercuts the way that Javier Castilleja did in his two fights with Felix. Mundine is a decent inside fighter, but not nearly good enough to beat Sturm at close range.

Mundine smothers his punches while on the inside and has a weak uppercut compared to Castilleja. Arthur Abraham would likely destroy Mundine at this point. For Mundine to beat a fighter like Abraham, he’d have to change his whole game plan to become more defensive oriented and I doubt that would happen at this point.

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