By Chris Williams: If trainer Freddie Roach gets his way, WBO light welterweight champion Chris Algieri (20-0, 8 KO’s) will need to prove himself for a second time by beating Ruslan Provodnikov (23-3, 16 KO’s) again before he feels that he’s earned the right to fight Roach’s No.1 fighter Manny Pacquiao in the future.
Roach thinks that Algieri was given a 12 round split decision that he didn’t deserve last Saturday night in Algieri’s win over Provodnikov at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York. What’s interesting about this fight is that Roach is saying that Provodnikov clearly won the fight, and yet Roach was heard telling him that he needed a knockout to win after the 10th round. Roach said in an interview after the fight that he had told Provodnikov to go for a knockout just to motivate him, not because he felt that he was losing.
“I’d rather like to see him fight a rematch first, and if he won it, and he won the fight clearly, then I think that he might deserve a fight like that,” said Roach said via RingTV. “Yeah, for Pacquiao, there’s not a lot of opponents out there right now…I’ve never heard of him [Algieri] before this fight…I don’t know know if he’s that big yet…I would have no problem getting Pacquiao ready to beat him.”
If Roach is able to convince Arum not to let Pacquiao fight Algieri, then we’ll likely see a rematch between Algieri and Provodnikov later this year. Roach says he wants the fight in a neutral venue in Las Vegas, Nevada instead of New York. It’s not a good venue to put a fight between them in Las Vegas, because neither fighter has a huge fan base in that area. It would be better to stage it in New York, because there are a lot of Russians in the city that might want to see Provodnikov fight, and Algieri’s from New York.
If they want to make money off ticket sales, then they need to stage the fight in New York. If Roach isn’t confident in Provodnikov’s chance of beating Algieri in a rematch then maybe he shouldn’t take the fight with him. If Roach is a good enough trainer, he should be able to improve on the mistakes that Provodnikov made last Saturday night so that he could somehow beat him in a rematch no matter where the fight takes place.
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