Abril battles Bogere for vacant WBA lightweight title on March 2nd

By Boxing News - 01/01/2013 - Comments

abril545By Jason Kim: Two high quality fighters Richard Abril (17-3-1, 8 KO’s) and Sharif Bogere (23-0, 15 KO’s) will go at it for the vacant WBA lightweight title on March 2nd in the United States. The venue still isn’t decided yet but it will shortly. This is the WBA strap that previously belonged to Brandon Rios. However, Rios failed to make weight and was stripped of the title. Rios has since moved u to light welterweight, leaving the WBA title available to Abril and Bogere.

Abril hasn’t fought since losing to Rios last year in April by a 12 round split decision. Abril fought remarkably well and you can say that he did well enough to deserve the win but two of the judges saw it differently. Abril hasn’t done anything since then and that’s unfortunate because he’ll have been out of the ring for 11 months by the time he does eventually fight Bogere. You don’t like to see a quality fighter like Abril losing a controversial decision that many boxing fans thought he won and then hurting himself further by staying out of the ring for almost an entire year. That’s not good for the fighter because he deserves much better than this.

Bogere, 24, has looked outstanding in winning all 23 of his previous fights during his four year career. However, Bogere’s opposition has been poor to say the least and it’s unknown how he’ll perform if his opponent doesn’t follow over like most of his opponents have. He’s coming into the fight with three straight knockouts and before that he defeated a decent fighter in Raymundo Beltran. However, Abril is a defensive artist and he’ll make it tough on Bogere if he tries to rush him to slug it out.

An interesting future fight could be the winner of the Bogere-Abril fight taking on WBC lightweight champion Adrien Broner. I’d like to see that. I don’t think Bogere has the frame or the chin to compete with Broner, but I think Abril would make it tough on Broner with his defensive skills.



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