By Dan Ambrose: The Nonito Donaire – Jorge Arce card was hit with a crushing blow today with the news that the Poonsawat Kratingdaenggym vs. Guillermo Rigondeaux fight won’t be on the card due to Poonsawat failing two blood tests. However, he didn’t test positive for performance enhancing drugs according to ESPN.
It was some kind of irregularity with his blood that caused him to fail the medical exam. This really hurts the Donaire-Arce card because there’s much too the card other than this fight and the main event, which is a terrible mismatch. The only thing about the card was going to be the Rigondeaux-Poonsawat fight, but the card doesn’t even have this fight.
HBO will still be televising the Donaire-Arce, but as far as an undercard there really isn’t much of one. There are a lot of fights on the undercard but it’s all obscure fighters that would test the knowledge of even hardcore boxing fans. It’s hard to imagine HBO having one of those fights televised.
Rigondeaux will be fighting in February against a still to be determined opponent. This really hurts him though because he was hoping to beat Poonsawat in a convincing manner and then get a fight against Donaire after that. That obviously won’t happen now, and we may not see Rigondeaux getting a fight with Donaire until late 2013 or more likely in 2014. I don’t see the fight happening this year unless Top Rank promoter Bob Arum wants it to happen.
Rigondeaux is trying to build a fan base in the U.S, and he’s done well in winning a lot of new fans despite only having 11 fights under his belt. But he needs to beat well known fighter like Donaire to really get the boxing public’s attention, but that’s hard to do when he can’t get a fight with him.
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