By Scott Gilfoid: Former WBA World welterweight champion Vyacheslav Senchenko decided to blow off his final press conference with Ricky Hatton today for whatever reason. I’m not going to blame the man because he might have had car problems or was stuck in traffic. Who knows?

It doesn’t matter as long as he shows up on Saturday night at the Manchester Arena to fight Hatton in front of the huge paying crowd that will show up.

Speaking about himself, Hatton said this as quoted by the telegraph.co.uk “The Ricky Hatton who sat here is the meanest and most ferocious Ricky Hatton you’ve ever seen…The desire I have for this fight is way beyond becoming a world champion.”

It looks like Hatton has some kind of point to prove. I guess he wants to get the monkey off of his back, but I sure wish he’d have chosen a better opponent. I mean, it’s kind of off putting to see Hatton fighting a guy that was stopped in his last fight by the feather-fisted Paulie Malignaggi. That spoils it for me. How on Earth can you get excited about a fight knowing that one of the participants was no not only beaten by pillow punching Malignaggi, but totally dominated. That wasn’t even a fight.

That automatically drops my interest in this fight to about zero. I don’t imagine the casual boxing fans that will be showing up on Saturday night to watch Hatton fight will be aware of Senchenko’s last fight, so they’ll probably be ready to crown Hatton as the king of the welterweight division if he smacks Senchenko around.

Fights like this give a distorted view of how good Hatton is and how much he has left in my view. Senchenko is 35, had never really fought anyone halfway good until his fight with Malingaggi, and doesn’t have the kind of inside fighting skills that will keep afloat in this fight for long. It just looks bad to me for Senchenko.