By Scott Gilfoid: Next Saturday night WBO light heavyweight champion Nathan Cleverly (26-0, 12 KO’s) will be facing the best opponent of his career by far in Sergey Kovalev (21-0-1, 19 KO’s) at the Motorpoint Arena, Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom.
Kovalev’s trainer John David Jackson sees this as an easy fight for Kovalev, #3 WBO, #7 WBA, with him coming out and blasting the easy to hit Cleverly out within the first three rounds.
Jackson said to the South Wales Argus “We don’t expect the fight to go much beyond three rounds…it’s difficult for Nathan; we’ll take him to school and the way that he responds to losing to Kovalev will shape his career…I can’t even rate Cleverly compared to the other world champions in the division; he hasn’t earned the right yet to even be compared to them.”
If Cleverly does make it past the third rounds, he’s going to be taking some god awful punishment, because his chin is basically his defense. Cleverly takes terrible head shots in his fights, and he’s been lucky thus far that he’s not faced anyone with enough power to take advantage of his face first type of fighting.
Cleverly fights a lot like Ricky Hatton with his tendency to take tons of head shots in the course of his fights. Cleverly’s been winning by outworking the mostly mediocre opposition he’s faced, but that doesn’t really mean a whole lot because look at the guys that Cleverly’s been facing. Seriously, look at them: Tommy Karpency, Shawn Hawk, Aleksy Kuziemski, Tony Bellew, Robin Krasniqi, Karo Murat, Nadjib Mohammedi and Antonio Brancalion.
Where in the heck is the quality? I can understand why Cleverly is so cocky about his ability. It happens when you get matched up against a bunch of soft opponents. A guy gets a bunch of easy wins and it goes to his head. I mean, you can throw all of those guys in the ring with Kovalev, and he’d have knocked out the whole bunch of them. Bellew might escape a knockout by clinching Kovalev all night long, but there’s no way on earth Bellew would beat Kovalev. It would sad mismatch.
I really hate to say it, but Cleverly doesn’t have the defense to beat Kovalev. He’s like the perfect opponent for Kovalev to pound on, and if Cleverly does make it the full 12 rounds, he’s going to be a mess from all the head shots he’ll have taken. Getting hit in the head by the likes Karpency for 12 rounds is nothing compared to what it’ll be like for Cleverly to eat leather from Kovalev for 12 rounds.
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