By Scott Gilfoid: WBO lightweight champion Ricky Burns (36-2-1, 11 KO’s) is facing the moment of truth tonight in his battle against American Terence Crawford (22-0, 16 KO’s) at the Scottish Exhibition Centre, in Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom. While Burns is saying he’s going to use a couple of different plans to try and defeat the talented 26-year-old Crawford, pretty much no one is giving Burns any chance at all in him actually winning the fight.
I mean, Burns’ fans obviously are giving him a chance at winning, but the fans that see the fight for what it is – a mismatch – see Burns as being at the end of the line and ready to be beaten badly. Burns already dodged a couple of bullets in his last two fights against Jose Gonzalez and Raymundo Beltran in escaping from those two bouts without a loss, but Crawford is a heck of a lot better than those two guys.
There won’t be any chance of him suffering an injury like there was with Gonzalez, and he’s not going to get robbed like Beltran was because he’s going to put the judges in a situation where they’ll positive goofy if they give Burns a win after he takes a beating tonight.
“I’m going to take him out of his comfort zone,” Burns said.
Crawford is too fast, too power, too talented and too tall for Burns to have any chance at winning this fight. What we’re going to see tonight is a ceremony of the changing of the guard where Crawford is given the WBO lightweight crown to take over as champion. Burns, the old solider, will lose and move on and try to make the best of what little time he has left in his career.
I don’t know what Burns can do to take a talent like Crawford out of his comfort zone because he doesn’t have the kind of power needed to accomplish a task like that. If Burns means he’s going to grab Crawford and hold and hit or clinch all night, then I guess you could say that he’ll be taking him out of his comfort zone. But Burns isn’t going to win a fight using those kinds of tactics tonight against Crawford. We saw Burns using those tactics against Beltran last September and they didn’t work. Yeah, the three judges working the fight gave Burns a 12 round draw, but he clearly only deserved to win 1 round in the entire fight.
Tonight, Crawford will without a doubt dominate Burns to the extent where he won’t even appear to win 1 round. It’ll be that one-sided, believe me. That’s why I say the three judges will look incredibly silly if they give Burns a victory or even a draw given the kind of beating he’s going to take for 12 rounds. I still can’t figure out what the judges were thinking in giving Burns a draw in the Beltran fight, but whatever the case, they just made themselves – and Burns – look really bad with that ridiculous decision.
It was laughable, because Burns fought the last 10 rounds with his mouth wide open from his fractured jaw, and he was doing nothing but holding and running from Beltran. I mean, how in the world could two judges not have seen that Burns was the clear loser in that fight?
Comments are closed.