By Scott Gilfoid: We recently saw what appeared to be WBO lightweight champion Ricky Burns putting it on his promoter/management as to whether he’ll be stepping in the ring with WBC lightweight champion Adrien Broner in a unification bout in 2013.

I for one never thought that Burns would fight Broner in the first place given that Burns had a chance to fight him last year and instead moved up in weight to lightweight. So, I wasn’t at all surprised when Burns told Steve Bunce that it’s up to his promoter whether he fights Broner.

I’m really hoping that Burns doesn’t duck the fight with Broner in order to continue fighting the likes of Kevin Mitchell because he’ll potentially turn off a lot of boxing fans if he doesn’t agree to fight Broner. So what if Burns gets totally dominated and knocked out by Broner at least he will have tried. Burns might even learn something from the loss that he can use for his future fights.

Burns hasn’t exactly been facing dangerous opposition in the past couple of years after winning the super featherweight title and then getting the WBO lightweight strap given to him. We’ve seen Burns fight the following opposition since 2010:

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Andreas Evensen
Joseph Laryea
Nicky Cook
Michael Katsidis
Paulus Moses
Kevin Mitchell

Those are decent fighters but not really what I consider even close to being the best in their respective divisions. We haven’t see Burns really step it up to fight really good fighters and it reminds me SO much of the kind of match-making that Nathan Cleverly has had since he was given the WBO light heavyweight title.

These are the guys I would have liked to have seen Burns fight by now:

Adrien Broner
Antonio DeMarco
Mercito Gesta
Miguel Vazquez
Sharif Bogere
Jose Gonzalez
Takashi Uchiyama
Diego Magdaleno
Yuriorkis Gamboa
Sergio Thompason
Juan Carlos Salgado

I don’t know how Burns was able to hold down the super featherweight title and not fight some of those names, and I don’t know why Burns still hasn’t faced better opposition now that he’s the WBO lightweight champion.