By Scott Gilfoid: Matchroom Sport promoter Eddie Hearn is reportedly interested in setting up a WBC lightweight eliminator bout on June 27th between his fighter former two division world champion Ricky Burns (36-3-1, 11 KO’s) and #4 WBC Javier Prieto (24-7, 18 KO’s) at the Braehead Arena in Glasgow, Scotland.
Hearn has already got the arena setup for a fight on June 27th, and he’s just checking with the World Boxing Council if they’ll give him the green light to make the Burns-Prieto fight a WBC eliminator to lock in a mandatory challenge to WBC lightweight champion Omar Figueroa, according to the Dailyrecord.
It was previously thought that Burns, 30, would look to face the winner of the Anthony Crolla vs. John Murray fight, but it looks like that idea is off the table. It’s likely that Burns didn’t like the idea of fighting the Crolla-Murray winner, because these guys are kind of like fringe contenders, and beating one of them would be a time-wasting thing for Burns, who doesn’t have a lot of time left in his career before he ages out.
Burns was whipped in his last fight by unbeaten Terrence Crawford last March in losing by a 12 round decision. It wasn’t a competitive fight, just as Burns’ controversial 12 round draw against Raymundo Beltran wasn’t a competitive fight either. Like in the Beltran fight, Burns mainly was getting beaten to the punch, and spent a lot of the fight clinching and moving rather than throwing shots.
Prieto is one of those fighters that the WBC has given an inflated ranking to. We see that a lot with the WBC unfortunately. One prime example was their No.1 ranking that they had given recently to 36-year-old super bantamweight Hugo Cazares before his fight against Carl Frampton. Cazares hadn’t done anything to deserve a high ranking like that, and he looked more like a 2nd tier fighter going into the Frampton fight. Sure enough, Frampton made the WBC look bad for giving Cazares the high ranking by beating him easily by a 2nd round knockout.
The 26-year-old Prieto has a mess of losses and a bunch of wins over poor opposition. Based on his losses and his empty wins, I have him ranked No.50 in the lightweight division, and certainly nowhere close to the WBC’s very kind ranking of No.4. What a sad ranking.
Prieto has losses to the following fighters: Roberto Ortiz, Edgar Puerta, Antonio Sanchez, Ramon Ayala, Ali Chebah, Miguel Vazquez and Ulises Jimenez. However, Prieto has won his last 8 fights against, albeit against largely weak opponents with dreadful records. In his last fight, he defeated 34-year-old Vicente Mosquera.
It looks like Hearn must see Figueroa as the weak leak in the chain of lightweight champions, because he’s not aiming Burns at the other lightweight champions Crawford, Richard Abril and Miguel Vazquez. I can’t blame him for that, because I think Abril and Vazquez would school Burns even worse than Crawford did. But with Figueroa, he’s definitely the weak leak among the lightweight champions, as he looked horrible in struggling to defeat the light-hitting Nihito Arakawa recently.
The bad thing about Burns fighting a limited fighter like Prieto is that if he can’t even beat this guy, then it’s really over. Yeah, Hearn can drag it out a little longer by putting Burns on the domestic circuit by matching him against the likes of Crolla, Murray and Derry Mathews, but it’ll be over for Burns as far as him being a world class contender.
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