Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. vs. Billy Lyell this Saturday night

By Jason Kim: This Saturday night, unbeaten middleweight contender Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. (41-0-1, 30 KO’s) will face the smaller junior middleweight Billy Lyell (22-8, 4 KO’s) in a 12 round bout at the Estadio Banorte, in Culiacan, Sinaloa, Mexico. Chavez Jr. is ranked an incredible number #1 by the WBC and needs a win over the 5’9″ Lyell to get a title shot against the newly appointed WBC middleweight champion Sebastian Zbik next. It would have been nice had Chavez’s handlers put him in with a middleweight contender, even a fringe one, instead of the much smaller light middleweight Lyell.

However, it looks like Chavez’s management doesn’t want to take any chances that Chavez will get beaten before he gets a good money fight against Zbik. The WBC moved the dangerous WBC middleweight champion Sergio Martinez out of Chavez’s path by making Martinez the WBC middleweight emeritus champion so that Chavez could face Zbik for the title instead of Martinez. This puts six foot Chavez in the drivers’ seat to not only beat the much smaller Lyell and then beat the WBC paper champion Zbik in order to claim the WBC title in May.

As for Lyell, he’s a good fighter and capable of giving Chavez Jr. a lot of problems. However, Lyell is small and doesn’t have much power to speak of, hence this is why he was chosen for Chavez. Lyell fights well against weak punchers but struggles badly whenever he’s put in with sluggers. Chavez should dominate Lyell because he won’t have to worry about getting hurt from any return fire the way that he would if Chavez’s management were willing to put him in with a good middleweight from his own division instead of the junior middleweight division. I suppose this is a step up from Chavez’s last scheduled Alfonzo Gomez, a welterweight.

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