By Scott Gilfoid: Kubrat Pulev (20-0, 11 KOs) will be getting his shot against IBF/IBO/WBA/WBO heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko (62-3, 52 KOs) on November 15th, provided that Wladimir’s torn left biceps injury is healed by then. Wladimir hurt his arm while sparring with one of his 15 sparring partners a week ago.

The Wladimir-Pulev fight will be staged at the O2 World Arena in Hamburg, Germany. They were set to fight on September 6th, but Wladimir’s arm injury wiped that fight date out.

As you would guess, Pulev is said to be less than happy about Wladimir’s injury, and he says he’s going to use the delay to be even more motivated when he gets in the ring with the 6’6” Ukrainian heavyweight in November.

If this means that Pulev is going to find some power for the rematch, then this could make their fight a heck of a lot more interesting than it previously was seen. Pulev needs power in a big way for him to have a chance of beating Wladimir, because he doesn’t have much else going for him in terms of speed and experience.

Pulev is unbeaten but he’s really never fought, unfortunately. He’s got a resume filled with soft jobs mostly, and the one fight where he stepped it up against 42-year-old Tony Thompson, Pulev didn’t look good in the first 4 rounds. In watching that fight, I think a younger Thompson would have made easy work of Pulev.

The November 15th date still has to be seen as not entirely certain. It’s still going to depend on Wladimir’s arm healing on time. With bicep injuries, they can be tricky and flare up again once a person starts working out again. If Wladimir reinjures it, we could be waiting for a long time before the Wladimir-Pulev fight takes place.

I’m just kind of wondering whether the IBF would give Wladimir one of the Emeritus tags like we see with the WBC. In other words, Wladimir would be temporarily stripped of his strap so that Pulev could fight for the belt. The next highest contender, in this case Vyacheslav Glazkov, would step up and fight Pulev for the title. Wladimir would then face the winner of the Pulev-Glazkov fight if he was still interested in reclaiming his IBF title.

Neither Wladimir nor his manager Bernd Boente said which one of his sparring partners was in the ring with him when the injury occurred, and they also didn’t say how it happened. If Wladimir took a punch to his left bicep or if he simply hurt it while swinging for the fences, it would be nice to know.