By Dan Ambrose: According to Dan Rafael, unbeaten Vanes Martirosyan’s fight against Ryan Davis for Saturday night has been canceled due to Davis failing the medical exam for the fight. Martirosyan and Davis were supposed to be fighting a 10 round bout on the undercard of the Nonito Donaire vs. Jeffrey Mathebula bout at the Home Depot Center in Carson, California, but that’s not going to happen now.

It’s too bad they couldn’t find a replacement for Martirosyan, because the Martirosyan-Davis fight was thought to be a mismatch anyway, so it’s not as if they couldn’t find another journeyman-level opponent for Martirosyan to blow out in one or two rounds and look good against.

This does have one positive and that’s Martirosyan and his promoters at Top Rank can now focus on trying to put together a WBC 154 pound elimination bout against Erislandy Lara that much sooner. The World Boxing Council ordered Lara and Martirosyan to fight the elimination bout with the winner of the fight to become the mandatory challenger for WBC junior middleweight champion Saul Alvarez.

Like a lot of people, I figured Martirosyan would say no to the fight, but shockingly he said yes. That still doesn’t mean the Lara-Martirosyan fight will go down, because Martirosyan’s promoter Bob Arum can still kill the fight by not negotiating. I honestly don’t see it happening and fully expect Martirosyan to continue his career facing journeyman or novice level fighters while he waits for the day in the future when he’s given a title shot without having to beat anyone in a elimination fight.