By Chris Williams: The betting establishment has installed WBO super bantamweight champion Nonito Donaire (31-1, 20 KO’s) as a 2 to 1 favorite to defeat WBA super bantamweight champion Guillermo Rigondeaux (11-0, 8 KO’s) this Saturday night in their HBO televised fight from the Radio City Music Hall in New York, New York.
What that means is exactly nothing because it’s all guesswork when you’re dealing with an unbeaten fighter that has won two gold medals like Rigondeaux has. There’s nothing in his past to go on that would make you think he’s going to lose.
The only thing the bettors have to go on is that Donaire has looked good in beating over-the-hill fighters like Jorge Arce and Toshiaki Nishioka, as well as much smaller guys than him like Fernando Montiel and Omar Narvaez.
There’s no blueprint on how to beat Rigondeaux, so you kind of have to dismiss the people setting the odds for the fight because it’s all guesswork at this point and you can’t accurately predict anything because Rigondeaux has never seriously challenged in his career.
The closest that Rigondeaux has come to any kind of adversity in his short four-year pro career was his fights against Ricardo Cordoba and Robert Marroquin. In both fights, Rigondeaux was facing guys that were much bigger than him and he struggled at times.
Marroquin, who looked to be a light welterweight in size the night of their fight in September of last year, was able to stun Rigondeaux on two occasions with hard left hooks. However, Rigondeaux quickly recovered in both cases and dominated Marroquin completely aside from those two occasions.
With Cardoba, Rigondeaux didn’t initiate his offense enough and coasted after building a big lead and that ended up making the fight much closer than it should have been. Rigondeaux moved too much for his own good in that fight and didn’t stay in the pocket, where he was having excellent success.
Rigondeaux has learned his lessons well from those fights and I expect him to be taking the fight to Donaire because he realizes that they’re not going to give him a decision if he boxes the more popular Donaire. He’s going to have to exchange with him to win, and I think we could see Rigondeaux scoring an early knockout in this fight if Donaire mistakes Rigondeaux for one of the older guys that he’s been fighting lately and tries to load up with one of his left hooks.
Rigondeaux has been training exclusively in how to stop left hooks from 140 lb. fighters in sparring sessions, so he’s not going to be in for a surprise when a 140 lb. Donaire walks into the ring and starts throwing left hooks with everything he’s got on April 13th.
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