By Scott Gilfoid: #1 IBF Kell Brook (31-0, 21 KO’s) is facing yet another tune-up this Saturday night against Alvarado Robles (17-2, 15 KO’s) to get ready for a possible world title shot in the Summer against IBF welterweight champion Shawn Porter. Brook must beat Alvarado to get to get his title shot against Porter. Brook has looked poor at times against some of the weak opposition that he’s been matched against, so you can’t really say for sure whether he can even beat a 2nd tier fighter like the little known Robles.
Certainly Brook’s controversial win over Carson Jones in 2012 showed the ceiling of his talent, and how he can be beaten against fringe level fighters. You can say that Brook has been taking nothing but tune-up fights for his entire 10-year pro career, because there’s not been one risky fight among the 31 on his resume. Sadly, Brook was said to have been stepping up in his last fight when he fought former WBA welterweight champion Vyacheslav Senchenko last October. Brook stopped him in the 4th round. However, Senchenko is someone that many boxing fans saw as little more than an ex-paper champion who was stopped by the feather-fisted Paulie Malignaggi in 2012, and was on his way to losing to a ring rusty Ricky Hatton in the same year before stopping him with a body shot. Senchenko was just another soft opponent for Brook.
The Brook-Robles fight will be taking place at the Echo Arena in Liverpool, UK. The card has cruiserweight Tony Bellew fighting Valery Brudov, super middleweight Paul Smith battling Tobias Webb, super middleweight Rocky Fielding taking on Charles Adamu, and lightweight Kevin Mitchell facing Mikheil Avakyan. In other words, a bunch of mismatches. Not much of interest on the card because it’s safe fights for all of them.
“He [Robles] will be very, very tough, and he will want to take my head off,” Brook said via Fightnews. “I am looking forward to getting out there and showing what I can do, and that is knock people out…If I don’t win this there is no big one to follow.”
It would be a heck of a lot better if Brook tried to show what he could do against a good contender like Keith Thurman instead of facing a fighter like Robles, who isn’t even ranked in the top 15. I mean, where is the quality? Brook should have started facing opposition 7 years ago instead of wasting 10 years of his career facing the likes of Carson Jones, Matthew Hatton, Hector David Saldivia, Luis Galarza, Rafal Jackiewicz, Lovemore Ndou and Philip Kotey. Those are the guys that Brook has fought since 2010, and it gets worse than that when you go all the way to the beginning of his career.
What scares me is what will happen if Brook does capture a world title at 147. If these are the guys that Brook has fought in the past 10 years, I find it hard to believe that he’ll be the type of world champion that will fight good opposition when fighting his optional title defenses.
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