By Scott Gilfoid: In a surprising move, Matchroom Sport promoter Eddie Hearn has made the November 22nd rematch between contenders Tony Bellew and Nathan Cleverly a pay-per-view match on Sky Box office from the Echo Arena in Liverpool, UK.
If you look at the fighters and the fact that neither of them are champions, it seems rather odd that this is a PPV fight. I mean, neither of these guys has done anything since they were sparked out last year by Adonis Stevenson and Sergey Kovalev.
Bellew and Cleverly have both moved up to cruiserweight and won a handful of fights, but they’ve done it against less than high quality opposition.
Neither of them has tested themselves against the top 5 contenders at cruiserweight. Heck, they haven’t even tested themselves against a good top 10 guy like Thabisio Mchunu. Asking boxing fans to pay to see two guys that were both exposed not too long ago seems baffling to me.
The Bellew-Cleverly 2 undercard has a number of well-known fighters such as Anthony Joshua, Jaime McDonnell, Scott Quigg, James DeGale and Callum Smith, but it’s not likely that any of them will be matched against anyone that has the potential to beat them. In other words, the A-side fighters will almost surely come out with victories in this fight unless one of them has an injury of some sort that causes them to lose the fight.
To me, I see the Bellew-Cleverly 2 fight as strictly non-PPV. I don’t care about the fighters that Hearn has added to the undercard. It still doesn’t rate in my eyes as a PPV worthy card. I mean, if Cleverly or Bellew were champions at cruiserweight and they had proved that they weren’t paper champions by beating the likes of Mchunu, Denis Lebedev and Marco Huck, then yeah, I could see their rematch being a PPV fight. But I can’t see it being a PPV fight with the poor opposition that Cleverly and Bellew have been fed since they moved up to the cruiserweight division.
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