Frampton’s manager hoping to lure Santa Cruz to Belfast

By Boxing News - 04/05/2014 - Comments

frampton40By Scott Gilfoid: Carl Frampton beat 36-year-old Hugo Cazares last night in 2nd round TKO in Belfast to earn a title shot against WBC super bantamweight champion Leo Santa Cruz. But not only does Frampton and his team want the Santa Cruz fight, they also want hometown advantage by having him travel all the way to Belfast, Northern Ireland and fight in front of a hostile crowd despite the fact that Santa Cruz is the champion and Frampton a mere challenger. What they want to do is offer Santa Cruz a lot of money from the expected large gate, and then hope he caves in and accepts the offer.

“We are going to make an outstanding proposal to Santa Cruz financially and hopefully he will come over to Belfast,” said Barry McGuigan, Frampton’s manager via ESPN.co.uk. “The sooner we can get it on the better. He has got the morals and I believe he genuinely wants to fight Carl. It is all about sitting and hammering out the deal.”

It’s unclear whether Santa Cruz will want to accept the offer and then potentially find himself getting jobbed. Cazares certainly didn’t feel like he was given a fair shake in this fight in terms of the referee’s count after the knockdown. In looking at it in slow motion, it looked like the referee Victor Loughlin started the count at 4 after motioning Frampton to the neutral corner.

Cazares, like most fighters, probably thought that Loughlin was starting with the count of 1, but in looking at the fight from different angles, Loughlin started with the count of 4. Cazares had to have thought that he still have another 4 more numbers before the count was offer and that’s why he likely stayed down.

As I said previously, I really doubt Golden Boy Promotions is going to let Santa Cruz come over to the Belfast or anywhere in the UK for the fight. The fight will need to take place in a neutral country like the United States. Santa Cruz was originally born in Mexico, so the U.S would be a good neutral country for the fight. With the fight taking place in the U.S, no one can say that either fighter is being given an advantage.

I can see how it would help Frampton to be fighting in own hometown, because of all the support he’d be getting. However, he’s going to have to come out of Belfast sooner or later in order to fight the best. We certainly didn’t see Frampton fighting the best last night in his fight against 36-year-old Cazares, did we? I’m still trying to figure out why on earth the WBC had Cazares ranked No.1 when none of the other sanctioning bodies had him ranked in their top 15. I saw it as some kind of honorary ranking based that Cazares did in his distant past 10 years ago rather than what he’d done recently with his career, because the guys been out of the loop for ages now.

If I was working for the WBC and I wanted to pick out the best possible contender to pit against Frampton, I certainly wouldn’t have ranked Cazares at No.1 and ordered this fight. I’d have ranked Cazares at No.30, and then went with Vic Darchinyan or Victor Terrazaz.



Comments are closed.