By Chris Williams: WBA/WBO super bantamweight champion super bantamweight champion Guillermo Rigondeaux (12-0, 8 KO’s) will be facing 33-year-old former two-time IBF bantamweight champion Joseph Agbeko (29-4, 22 KO’s) on December 7th in Atlantic City, New Jersey, according to Boxrec and the Sweet Science.
While this may not the biggest fight out there for Rigondeaux, it’s a lot better than Nonito Donaire’s upcoming match-up against 37-year-old Vic Darchinyan on November 9th.
Rigondeaux wanted to fight Donaire again to prove that his one-sided 12 round unanimous decision win over him last April wasn’t a fluke, but instead Donaire’s promoter Bob Arum decided to match him against Darchinyan, who has lost 2 out of his last 4 fights.
Agbeko has fought only once since Showtime’s bantamweight tournament ended in December 2011. Agbeko was beaten in the tournament by Abner Mares. In his last fight, Agbeko defeated Luis Melendez by a 12 round unanimous decision last March.
Agbeko still looks like the same fighter he was before despite his time away from boxing, but it’s still going to be tough for him to be facing a guy as good as Rigondeaux with only 1 fight in the last 2 years. That’s too much time off for someone to be facing Rigondeaux. Agbeko is going to lose this fight and lose it badly.
Rigondeaux is sitting on top of the super bantamweight division waiting for his promoter Bob Arum to find important fights with him. It was thought that once Rigondeaux made easy work of Donaire that he’d become a big star on HBO and get all the big names. But instead we heard Arum talking about how the HBO executives weren’t interested in televising Rigondeaux’s fights, and this has led to him being inactive for the past 6 months.
It’ll have been 8 months by the time that Rigondeaux fights in December, and Agbeko isn’t even a big fight for Rigondeaux. If he’s going to have to wait 8 months between fights and then get guys that are on the downsides of their careers, then we may not see too much from Rigondeaux.
Arum should be putting Rigondeaux in the ring at least 3 times per year, and he should be getting a rematch with Donaire and fights against the likes of Carl Frampton, Leo Santa Cruz, Scott Quigg and Kiko Martinez.
Arum has got to do a better job of matching his fighters up because it’s not interesting to see Donaire facing a past his best Darchinyan, and now Rigondeaux fighting Agbeko. The fights would have been nice 2-5 years ago, but not now.
Rigondeaux and Donaire should be facing better opposition than this. Arum is obviously counting on the casual boxing public being interested in the fights due to the names of Darchinyan and Agbeko, but it’s no good if the fighters are losing more than winning nowadays and getting up there in age. It just means that the Donaire-Darchinyan and Rigondeaux-Agbeko fights will be mismatches.
Agbeko is ranked #13 WBO in the bantamweight division, and this is going to be asking a lot of him to be able to move up to the super bantamweight division and face the best fighter in the division. He’s not going to do well with fighting at super bantamweight instead of in the 118 lb. division.
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