Burns and Moses make weight for Saturday’s fight in Glasgow

By Boxing News - 03/09/2012 - Comments

Image: Burns and Moses make weight for Saturday's fight in GlasgowBy Scott Gilfoid: Newly crowned WBO lightweight champion Ricky Burns (33-2, 9 KO’s) made weight on Friday for his fight against former WBA lightweight champion Paulus Moses (28-1, 19 KOs) at the Braehead Arena, in Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom. Burns, 28, weighed in at 134, whereas Moses came in at 133. This is going to be one of the few fights where the 5’10” Burns doesn’t really have a size advantage, because he’s normally at least three to five inches taller than his opposition.

Moses, 5’8″, is only two inches shorter than Burns but he makes that up by having a much important two and half inch reach advantage over Burns. This could be crucial for this fight because Burn doesn’t have much in the way of power, and often likes to try and out-jab his shorter opponents or outwork them at close range. Burns can do neither against Moses, because Moses has a much, much better jab and has knockout power with his left hook and right hand.

I rate Moses as an excellent puncher with enough power to take Burns out if he tries to fight him like he’s done with his other opposition when he fought at super featherweight. He can’t fight Moses from long range because Moses will out-jab him and make him look bad. By the same token, if Burns tries to take the fight to Moses, he’ll be walking into a lot of potentially knockout punches. He’d be crazy to try and overwhelm Moses with punches because he’ll get hit with too many shots.

This isn’t a weight drained Moses he’ll be fighting, so there won’t be the advantage against him like there was in Burns’ biggest win of his career against Roman Martinez in September 2010. Even in that fight, Burns was put on the deck in the first round and barely won the fight. Moses is a bigger, faster, stronger version of Martinez and things are going to go really bad for Burns on Saturday night unless Moses gets out over night. I don’t see that happening in this fight.



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