By Chris Williams: The dust hasn’t even settled on Ruslan Provodnikov’s 10th round TKO victory over WBO light welterweight champion Mike Alvarado (34-2, 23 KO’s) tonight in Denver, Colorado, and they’re already talking about a rematch between them. According to Fightnews, Provodnikov’s promoter Artis Pellulo is interested in an Alvarado-Provodnikov, but the fight would have to take place in Russia rather than Denver.
At this point I’m sure that Alvarado won’t mind traveling to Russia to take the fight just as long as he gets the rematch.
For Provodnikov (23-2, 16 KO’s) a rematch with Alvarado might be about as good as it gets for him. Top Rank promoter Bob Arum likely won’t let Provodnikov face his number #1 money fighter Manny Pacquiao due to Provodnikov being a big name. He doesn’t have a huge fan base to fall back onto like Arum’s other fighters Brandon Rios. It’s too bad that there isn’t a bigger fight for Provodnikov other than another Alvarado fight because he deserves a big cash money bout against someone like Pacquiao.
Tonight’s fight between Alvarado and Provodnikov was a pretty exciting one. It would have been a lot more exciting had Alvarado chosen to stand his ground and fight Provodnikov in a toe-to-toe battle. In hindsight, I think that would have been a better plan for Alvarado than choosing to move. The problem with moving is that Provodnikov was forcing Alvarado to stop and trade with anyway. But the movement hurt Alvarado because he looked out of breath by the midway point in the fight.
Alvarado’s trainer Shann Villhauer wasn’t happy with the way that Alvarado fought Provodnikov. According to Fightnews, Villhauer wanted him to stand and fight Provodnikov. Alvarado seemed to think that he could outbox Provodnikov in the same way that he out-boxed Brandon Rios last March in their rematch.
Alvarado should have realized that he wouldn’t be able to do the same thing he did with Rios against Provodnikov because he was much faster on his feet and far better at cutting off the ring.
Alvarado should have realized this early on because he could have saved a lot of energy by not running. Alvarado seemed to do well when he had Provodnikov in close. Alvarado was the superior fighter when he had Provodnikov too close to use his leverage on his shots. It’s just strange that Alvarado failed to take advantage of this.
In a rematch, Alvarado is going to need to get his weight down a little closer to 140, because he can’t be rehydrating to near 160 lbs. like he did tonight and expect to be able to fight hard for 12 rounds. That’s too much to be draining down to make weight, and it probably wore Alvarado down just from putting the weight back on so quickly.
Alvarado was fighting well in the first 6 rounds of the fight. I had him winning the fight at the time, but I also thought he looked tight and likely to run out of gas. It’s just too bad that Alvarado didn’t slow the fight down by taking it to the inside and keeping it there for the entire rounds instead of using so much movement.
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