Cleverly could train at Wildcard gym in LA to get ready for Krasniqi bout

By Boxing News - 12/24/2012 - Comments

cleverly45Notice the beautiful punching form from Nathan Cleverly – By Scott Gilfoid: WBO light heavyweight champion Nathan Cleverly (25-0, 12 KO’s) is kicking around the idea of taking his next training camp to the Wildcard Gym in Los Angeles, California to get ready for his next fight against #1 challenger Robin Krasniqi (39-2, 15 KO’s) on March 16th in the UK.

Cleverly did a tiny bit of training at Freddie Roach’s Wildcard Gym before Cleverly’s massacre of 2nd tier fighter Shawn Hawk last month and Cleverly seemed to like the atmosphere in addition to the good sparring he got in the gym.

Cleverly said to thesun.co.uk “There’s real potential there; we spent a short time in the Wildcard Gym and I really enjoyed it. It was tough, very unique and intense. Freddie was impressed with what he saw and there’s a possibility I could go out there for a training camp before my next fight.”

Cleverly did some sparring with unbeaten Roach fighter cruiserweight Lateef Kayode. I saw some of the sparring between them and it looked like both guys were pretty even, which isn’t exactly a good sign before there’s better fighters at cruiserweight than Kayode. Of course, Kayode is big fighter and this wasn’t like 12 rounds of actual sparring or anything close to a real fight.

Kayode would be real trouble for Cleverly if this was an actual fight and not just a sparring session because the guy has power and he throws a lot of punches.

As far as Cleverly’s brilliant idea of him training at the Wildcard gym to get ready for the Krasniqi fight goes, I don’t see the point of it. The fight is a mismatch anyway, so why does Cleverly need to waste a flight to and back from the United States when he’s already going to easily beat Krasniqi.

I’m being practical here. I could understand it if this was Cleverly about to fight Chad Dawson, Bernard Hopkins, Beibut Shumenov , Ismayl Sillakh or Tavoris Cloud, but this is a mismatch. Krasniqi has an inflated resume filled with fluff victories and he’s more like a fighter that’s just starting out than one with 39 wins under his belt.

A ton of Krasniqi’s wins came against fighters with a 0-0 record. In other words, they were making their debut in fights against him, and a bunch of other wins on his resume came against fighters with losing records. There’s just no quality whatsoever on Krasniqi’s resume and this is a terrible mismatch, and it’s so, so sad that the World Boxing Organization has a limited fighter like Krasniqi ranked #1 by their organization, because he looks like pure 2nd tier to me.

Cleverly can fly to Los Angeles and train at the Wildcard gym if he wants to but isn’t this kind of overkill for who he’s facing? If I was Cleverly’s promoters I’d tell him to forget it because it’s not needed. Cleverly can fly over to LA and train over there when he finally fights a meaningful opponent, but until then he’s okay with his situation in Wales.



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