By Scott Gilfoid: British light heavyweight champion Tony Bellew (16-1, 10 KO’s) will be making his first defense of his British title on April 14th against Danny McIntosh (13-2, 7 KO’s) at the Echo Arena in Liverpool, UK.

It’s still unclear who else will be on the card with Bellew-McIntosh but for now this all we got.

Both Bellew and McIntosh are coming off of losses and that’s not a good thing to get excited about. Bellow lost a controversial 12 round majority decision to WBO light heavyweight champion Nathan Clevery last October, while McIntosh was stopped in the 3rd round by #3 World Boxing Organization rated contender Eduard Gutknecht last May.

Gutknecht, 29, is the same guy that was easily beaten by WBO super middleweight champion Robert Stieglitz by a lopsided 12 round unanimous decision in April 2010. That kind of tells you where McIntosh stands at the world level. I thought Bellew deserved at least a 12 round draw against Cleverly, but I know how it goes when you got a champion facing a challenger.

Being the champion is like starting the fight with three rounds already in the bank. The challenger has to battle through that to try and get a win. Bellew messed up by running out of gas in the last two rounds of the fight and that allowed Cleverly to get a narrow win.

It’s too bad Cleverly didn’t want to face Bellew again to try and improve on the performance because he’s now facing a guy that’s not even ranked in the top 15 by the WBO in Tommy Karpency. It looks like Cleverly had a taste of Bellew and decided it was better to seek out another alternative with someone ranked even lower than the #13 ranked Bellew.

I’m not really too keen on the Bellew-McIntosh fight to tell you the truth. I’d much rather see Bellew facing actual contenders so he can improve instead of facing guys that were just knocked out like McIntosh. Bellew should be fighting the guy that knocked McIntosh out rather than McIntosh. But I guess you can’t expect those kinds of matchups for domestic level fights.

I’ve seen McIntosh fight a number of times and he’s a got a little power as we saw in him blasting out Tony Oakey in the 2nd round in February 2010. Unfortunately, after two wins over Hastings Rasani and Thierry Karl, McIntosh’s good luck came to an abrupt end when he was smashed by Gutknecht last May in an 8th round TKO. I’m not sure why McIntosh hasn’t fought since then.

You don’t like to see guys sitting around and throwing away half of the year doing zilch. Hopefully, the loss didn’t mess up McIntosh’s head and cause him to start doubting himself. But then that’s another reason why it’s not a good idea to fight guys that are coming off a knockout loss. Bellew would be better off taking on fighters that are winning and not off of a KO loss like McIntosh. I think I hate this fight.