Bradley sees Chaves as a dirty fighter

By Boxing News - 12/05/2014 - Comments

bradley73By Dan Ambrose: Former two division world champion Tim Bradley (31-1, 12 KOs) feels that his next opponent Diego Chaves (23-2, 19 KOs) is a dirty fighter after Bradley sat down and watched some video of Chaves’ last fights. Bradley and Chaves will be fighting each other on December 13th at the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.

Bradley wants to face the bigger names in the sport like Miguel Cotto and Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, but instead of facing them his promoter Bob Arum matched him against Rios. Both fighters are coming off of losses, so it makes sense that Arum would match Bradley against Chaves. There’s no way that Cotto and Canelo would agree to fight Bradley right now given how poor he looked in his last fight against Manny Pacquiao and in his fight against Ruslan Provodnikov.

“He’s [Chaves] a dirty fighter man. In the beginning I didn’t think he was, but then I went back and I started watching film on him,” Bradley said via Fightnews.com. “He’s a really dirty fighter. Throwing elbows, trying to scrape the eyes with the gloves, pushing down on the head. He does a lot of dirty tactics. Guess what? He hates getting hit to the body. So when I get in close on him I’m going to expect the rough house tactics.”

There are some boxing fans who feel that Bradley is a dirty fighter due to his habit of colliding heads with his opponents. Bradley obviously sees these head-butts as an accident, but the fact that they take place still results in cuts at times for Bradley’s opponents.

If you look at Chaves’ last fight against Brandon Rios, it might give you the impression that Chaves fouls a lot. However, if you look at how Rios was head-butting Chaves when the two of them would come together for a clinch, you can understand why Chaves was choosing to retaliate with fouling of his own.

In Chaves fight against Keith Thurman, he didn’t show any signs of fouling. It was a clean fight from Chaves. But his fight against Rios was a much different story, but some of that may have been due to the constant head-butts from Rios when Chaves was initiating a clinch. Rios was lowering his head and sticking the crown of his head directly into the fact of Chaves when he was clinching him.

“Hopefully we’ve got a great ref in there that’s gonna be able to take control,” Bradley said. “I’m ready for that dirty stuff, I’ve got some dirty tricks of my own and everybody knows what it is. Bring it man, bring it.”

Hopefully, Bradley doesn’t start head-butting because the fight could wind up as nearly unwatchable if that happens. Bradley sees himself as a fighter on a higher level than Chaves. He shouldn’t resort to fouling if he gets fouled on occasion. If Bradley is truly a better fighter than Chaves, then he should be focusing on beating him fair and square instead of resorting to retaliatory fouling.



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