By Scott Gilfoid: With all the other British world champions having been mowed down with the recent losses of David Haye and Amir Khan, only WBO light heavyweight champion Nathan Cleverly (23-0, 11 KO’s) remains as the last Brit world champion, and he’s not likely to stay champion for long unless he keeps getting matched carefully.

Cleverly, 24, says one of his goals for 2012 is to keep his world title. I don’t know if that’s possible, I really don’t. We saw Cleverly about to lose his strap against #13 ranked Tony Bellew in his last fight last October in a close 12 round majority decision win. The thing is it didn’t even take a top five contender to put Cleverly in dire straits.

Can you imagine what a quality contender like Chad Dawson would have done to Cleverly had he been in there with him instead of the near bottom ranked Bellew? It would have been a massacre of the first order.
Cleverly said to Walesonline.co.uk “Remaining world champion is definitely my New Year’s resolution going into 2012.”
I wish him a lot of luck, because he’s going to need it.

Cleverly is looking for an opponent for his next fight on February 25th. There was talk that he would be fighting Andrzej Fonfara but it looks as if they’re going in a different direction and will be looking for someone else. Thank god. Please let it be someone good, someone in the top five like Dawson or Jean Pascal. Supposedly they offered Beibut Shumenov the fight, but he turned it down. I have a really hard time buying that. Why would Shumenov turn down someone like Cleverly? It would a fairly easy win and he would add Cleverly’s World Boxing Organization title to his collection.

Cleverly wants to fight unification bouts against champions Bernard Hopkins and Tavoris Cloud. The problem is there’s no value add in fighting an unknown like Cleverly. The guy has kept himself under wraps fighting in the UK all these years and no one has heard of him in the United States. Those special talents aren’t going to waste time fighting a guy that no one in the U.S has heard of when there’s no gain. It doesn’t matter if they pick up Cleverly’s title, because all that means is an extra sanctioning fee to be burned with. If Cleverly had a name, then Hopkins and Cloud would have beat down his door a long time ago to beat him and take his strap.