(Photo credit: Ed Mulholland/HBO) By Scott Gilfoid: #1 WBO mandatory contender Brian Rose (25-1-1, 7 KO’s) says he’s going to take unbeaten WBO junior middleweight champion Demetrius Andrade’s strap from him on Saturday night in their long-awaited clash at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.
Rose has been pining away for that WBO strap for ages now, and he doesn’t like the idea that much of the boxing world sees him as little more than a sacrificial lamb being brought in for Andrade to slaughter in front of a large crowd at the Barclays Center.
Rose’s promoter Eddie Hearn has built him up to the point where Rose is saying many of the same things that he’s been spouting recently. Whether Rose actually believes what he’s saying or if he’s just regurgitating Hearn’s comments is unclear.
“Out of all of them, Andrade is the weakest of the world champions at light middleweight,” Rose said via Dan Rafael of ESPN. “I haven’t come over here to get beat and just make up the numbers. I’m here to take the chance that I have earned, and I am positive that I am going to come home with a world title. I am here to do a job.”
Rose sure does seem confident, doesn’t he? You always have to worry when you see a guy getting too cocky for his own good, especially when he’s taking a huge step up in class the way that Rose is on Saturday night.
I really don’t see this one going too well for Rose. He appears to be way, way out of his class in this fight, and I’d be surprised if he’s still hanging around by the 6th round. In my painstaking research in writing this article, I sat through Rose’s fights against Javier Maciel and Prince Arron, both of which Rose defeated by 12 round split decisions. I’m not sure whether the judges were confused in those fights and accidentally picked the wrong guy on both occasions, but I had both Arron and Maciel beating Rose without problems.
The 6’3” Arron really did a number on Rose, and it was pretty one-sided. I had a feeling that Aaron was up against it early in the fight when the commenters were ignoring the punches he was raining down on Rose nonstop and instead were focusing on the occasional punches that Rose was landing. Arron came into that fight with 3 losses, while Rose had an unbeaten resume, but littered with nothing but weak opposition from top to bottom as far as the eye could see.
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