Alexander vs. Brook: Devon ready to take advantage of Kell’s lack of experience

By Boxing News - 11/21/2012 - Comments

Image: Alexander vs. Brook: Devon ready to take advantage of Kell's lack of experienceBy Scott Gilfoid: IBF welterweight champion Devon Alexander (24-1, 13 KO’s) will be making his first defense of his IBF strap against his #1 mandatory challenger Kell Brook (29-0, 19 KO’s) on January 19th in the United States in a still to be determined venue. Although the 26-year-old Brook has more fights on his resume compared to the 25-year-old Alexander the difference here is that Alexander has much more experience against quality opposition compared to Brook. It’s not even close.

Here are the well known fighters that Alexander has fought:

Andriy Kotelnik
Tim Bradley
Randall Bailey
Marcus Maidana
Lucas Matthysse
Juan Urango
Junior Witter
DeMarcus Corey

Now compare that with the opposition that Brook has fought:

Carson Jones
Lovemore N’dou
Hector David Saldivia
Rafael Jackiewicz
Michael Jennings
Matthew Hatton

There’s really comparison at all between the two fighters in terms of experience. Brook has fought much inferior opposition and in his one fight where he actually fought someone that was kind of good in Carson Jones, Brook barely won the fight. Indeed, I had the fight scored a draw and I thought Brook would have bee knocked out had the referee not suddenly stopped the action in the 12th go give Jones a long warning. At that time Brook was badly hurt and taking tremendous punishment.

It looked like all Jones needed was two or three shots and Brook would have been down, but the warning that Jones got from the referee took away valuable time that he could have used to finish off Brook. That was Brook’s best opponent and he failed to prove that he’s better than him. He should gave Jones a rematch because a win like that really didn’t prove anything.

He Brook-Alexander fight is going to show why it’s not a good idea for the sanctioning bodies to give high ratings to fighters that don’t have the experience to be given that kind of rating because Brook is going to be taking a tremendous leap up in competition against Alexander and I don’t see Brook being ready to take that kind of a step up.

You certainly can’t point to Brook’s win over Saldivia to say that he’s ready for Alexander because that guy looked nothing like a 1st fighter and I’m still trying to understand why the World Boxing Association had Saldivia ranked so highly given his lack of experience and his blowout loss to Said Ouali in 2010. That loss should have kept Saldivia out of the tier as far as I’m concerned because if he couldn’t even beat Oauli, then what was he doing being put in the top 5 by the WBA?

I think Brook’s promoter Eddie Hearn REALLY blew it by not having Brook face WBO welterweight champion Tim Bradley when that fight was offered to him instead of facing Saldivia. Brook doesn’t match-up at all with Alexander and he’s only going to get beaten badly in this fight. Against Bradley, I think Brook would have had a chance because he’s not as offensively talented as Alexander is.



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