By Dan Ambrose: The December 7th fight between Erislandy Lara (18-1-2, 12 KO’s) and former WBA light middleweight champion Austin Tout (26-1, 14 KO’s) will have the vacant WBA 154 lb. title on the line for the fight at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York. Trout, 28, used to possess the WBA title until losing a controversial 12 round unanimous decision to the highly hyped Saul “Canelo” Alvarez last April in San Antonio, Texas.
It was a very questionable decision because Trout had seemingly done more than enough to get the victory, yet the judges gave the fight to Canelo. One judge had Canelo winning almost every round of the fight by scoring it 118-109. It was pretty sad scoring by that judge and another black eye for the sport.
Trout has been trying to get a rematch against Canelo ever since but he’s been ignored. Canelo took a fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr. last September and was trounced by him. Since his loss, Canelo still hasn’t shown any interested in wanting to mix it up with Trout again. Trout says he’d like to fight Canelo in Las Vegas, Nevada next time instead of Texas. I can’t blame him. That was a pretty isolated place without almost zero Trout fans.
Lara is coming off of a less than impressive 10th round TKO win over Alfredo Angulo last June. Lara ran out of gas after the first three rounds of the fight and was knocked down in the 4th and 9th rounds. However, he lucked out due to Angulo’s right eye closing on him completely. In the 10th, Angulo opted to quit fighting after getting hit hard on his badly swollen and painful-looking right eye. Lara got the victory but it was hardly an impressive performance by any means. It was more of a win due to an injury than actual win, because if Angulo’s eye didn’t close on him, he would have continued dominating Lara and likely knocked him out.
In his previous fight before that, Lara fought to a 9 round technical draw against Vanes Martirosyan last year in November. That fight was halted after an accidental head-butt caused a big cut over the left eye of Martiriosyan.
Lara has victories over Freddy Hernandez, Ronald Hearns, and Delray Raines in the past two years. In July of 2011, Lara was beaten by Paul Williams by a controversial 12 round majority decision. A lot of boxing fans thought that Lara should have gotten the victory, but it wasn’t his luck on that night. In his fight before that, Lara fought to a 10 round draw against Carlos Molina in March of 2011. I had Molina winning that one, as Lara couldn’t handle the inside fighting ability of Molina and he was getting dominated in that fight.
Trout should be a big problem for Lara in this fight due to his boxing ability, power and elusiveness. Trout will no doubt be putting a lot of pressure on Lara looking to duplicate what Angulo had done to him in their recent fight. If Trout can keep the pressure on Lara, he should be able to stop him.
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