Ricky Burns vs. Alexandre Lepelley this Saturday, 10/4 in Leeds

By Boxing News - 10/01/2014 - Comments

burns453By Scott Gilfoid: Former two division world champion Ricky Burns (36-4-1, 11 KOs) will be facing replacement opponent Alexandre Lepelley (17-1-1, 3 KOs) this Saturday night on October 4th at the First Direct Arena, Leeds, Yorkshire, United Kingdom.

Burns, 31, was supposed to be fighting the 32-year-old Leonardo Esteban Gonzalez, but he pulled out of the fight for an unknown reason. However, it wasn’t difficult to replace Gonzalez because he wasn’t a top tier opponent, but rather just a guy scheduled as a tune-up fight for Burns to get him prepared for fighting light welterweights.

What’s kind of interesting is that Gonzalez is a lightweight, so it’s not as if the fight was really going to help Burns in any way get ready for fighting 140 pound fighters. At least Lepelley is an actual light welterweight, even though he’s a light hitter, which obviously is a good thing for Burns.

This Saturday will be Burns’ first fight in the 140 pound division and he’s hoping that he’ll be able to reinvent his career in that weight class. Unfortunately, the chances of Burns accomplishing that is slim and none. He had success at both super featherweight and lightweight due in large part to his 5’10” size.

There aren’t too many super featherweights or lightweights with that kind of size, and that obviously helped Burns a great deal. The other thing that help Burns is that he didn’t ever face anyone that you can really good at in either of those divisions until he fought Raymundo Beltran and Terence Crawford.

Once Burns stepped it up against those guys, he was pretty well shown his place. In moving up in weight to light welterweight, Burns will still have the height advantage over most of his opponents, but what will likely badly his chances of success is his lack of power. The light welterweights hit a lot harder than the lightweights that Burns has been facing, and he’s going to likely be in for a rude awakening at 140.

Burns will no doubt win on Saturday against France’s Lepelley, but that fight is only going to likely delay the inevitable for Burns. I can’t see Burns finding success at 140, and he’s going to find that out as soon as he steps it up for the first time against a halfway decent fighter.

Burns’ best chances of success is to get a nutritionist and find a way for him to go back down to super featherweight where he can compete against the likes of Mikey Garcia, Rances Barthelemy, Takashi Uchiyama, and Takashi Miura for their titles. I mean, I can’t see Burns beating any of them, but I give him a much better chance in this weight class than he would have in fighting in the light welterweight division.