By Allan Fox: #3 WBA, #7 WBC, #8 WBO, featherweight contender Gary Russell Jr. (21-0, 13 KO’s) will be facing only his second contender of his four-year pro career when he faces #7 WBO, #15 WBA Vyacheslav Gusev (20-2, 5 KO’s) in a scheduled for 10 rounds on Showtime on the undercard of the clash between WBC featherweight champion and unbeaten challenger Jayson Velez at the Apollo Theater, in New York, New York, USA.
On the same card will be lightweights Richard Abril and Sharif Bogere fighting for the vacant WBA World lightweight title.
Russell Jr., 24, has been brought a long really slowly since turning pro in 2009 despite having had an extensive amateur career. He’s been knocking out most of his opponents early in his fights for the past year, which is a pretty good sign that he’s really to face better opposition.
Gusev, 27, is a step up for Russell Jr, but not much of one. Gusev doesn’t have a lot of power, and he’s only faced two quality opponents – Juan Carlos Burgos & Alisher Rahimov – during his 10 year pro career and he was soundly beaten by both of them.
The remainder of Gusev’s fights has come against C level opposition, and for that reason you can’t really call this much of a step up for Russell Jr. The only real positive about Gusev is that he’s shown a good chin during his career, but then again he still hasn’t faced the real dangerous guys at featherweight like Mikey Garcia, Orlando Salido, Jayson Velez and Daniel Ponce De Leon.
Russell Jr. has really fast hands and good power. He doesn’t move his head a lot, but he makes up for that by having blazing hand speed. He’s looked good in beating Leonilo Miranda, Heriberto Ruiz, Christopher Perez and Roberto Castaneda in the past two years.
It would be interesting to see how Russell Jr. would do against the likes of De Leon or Velez if his promoters were willing to finally test him out.
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