By Scott Gilfoid: WBO lightweight champion Ricky Burns (33-2, 9 KO’s) hasn’t had to deal with much adversity in quite a long time due to the careful matchmaking that’s been done for him. He had an easy time at super featherweight as the WBO champion, and moved up in weight after only three title defenses against less than strong opposition. He recently was given the WBO lightweight title by the World Boxing Organization without having to win it in the ring. He’ll be making his first defense of the title on March 10th against Paulus Moses (28-1, 19 KO’s) at the Wembley Arena in Wembley, London, UK.

Moses, 33, has got the speed, power, jab and most importantly the arm length to defeat the 5’10” Burns. For a lightweight or super featherweight, Burns is incredibly tall and he’s used his height with great effectiveness against the guys that he’s been matched against. Although he failed to fight Adrien Broner when he came a calling for a fight, I guess you can’t blame him for not taking that fight. Burns said he could no longer make the super featherweight limit anymore and I guess it was just a coincidence that he could no longer make the weight just when he had a fight against Broner staring him in the face. Yeah, it was one of those things where the timing was perfect for Burns to vacate his WBO super featherweight title, win the interim WBO lightweight title with a win over Michael Katsidis and then have the WBO hand him the regular WBO lightweight title outside of the ring.

I really like Moses in this fight. He’s got a lot of talent, a lot of power and a great jab. The guy has got the goods and I see him pulling off a huge upset in this by hurting Burns and possibly stopping him.