By Scott Gilfoid: After toiling away for 12 years as a pro and finding some success but also failure, newly crowned WBC Silver lightweight champion Kevin Mitchell (39-2, 29 KOs) thinks he’s ready to win a world title against one of the lightweight champions like WBC belt holder Jorge Linares of WBA champ Richard Abril.
Last Saturday night, Mitchell defeated a guy that was totally made to order for him in 29-year-old #6 WBC Daniel Estrada (32-4-1, 24 KOs) by an 8th round TKO at the O2 Arena in London, UK. This fight was the equivalent of Brand Rios vs. Mike Alvarado 3 with Estrada coming off as the Alvarado fighter.
It was perfect match-making on Mitchell’s promoter Eddie Hearn’s part in finding a guy who was easy to hit, not particularly fast or powerful, and who’d been knocked out in his last fight by Omar Figueroa.
Like Alvarado, Estrada made Mitchell look perhaps a lot better than he really is as a fighter. But that’s not stopping Hearns from talking Mitchell up as the best fighter in the lightweight division.
“He’s the No 1 challenger to Jorge Linares and we want that shot,” Hearn said via Skysports.com. “There’s not many lightweights in the world that can compete with him. I’ve got to deliver the shot for Kevin Mitchell because I believe he can win a world title and on that performance I think he can beat any lightweight in the world.”
So there it is. Hearn thinks that Mitchell can beat “any lightweight in the world” now that he’s beaten Estrada, a fighter who was knocked out in his previous fight. My question is if Hearn believes that Mitchell can beat any lightweight in the world, then why in the heck didn’t he match him up against a better fighter than Estrada? I mean, come on. How about putting Mitchell in with the likes of Terence Crawford, Omar Figueroa, Yuriorkas Gamboa, Ray Beltran, Denis Shafikov, Thomas Dulorme, Hank Lundy or Darley Perez? I rate those fighters as a heck of a lot better than Estrada, and yet Hearn didn’t match Mitchell up with any of them? Now why is that?
Why did Hearn match Mitchell up against a guy that was knocked out in his previous fight? If Hearn believes that Mitchell is the best fighter in the lightweight division, then shouldn’t he be putting Mitchell in with guys that can actually test him to see if he’s for real rather than a guy that was just knocked out?
“I will win it,” Mitchell said via Skysports.com about him winning a world title in the future.
I don’t know if Mitchell is going to win anything. I do know he can beat the guys that Hearn has been putting him in with, but that’s not really saying much, is it? Hearn still hasn’t taken the training wheels off of Mitchell even though the guy is 30-years-old and has been fighting as a pro for over a decade.
With that much time in grade, Mitchell should have been put in with the likes of Gamboa, Beltran, Shafikov, Perez, Figueroa, Dulorme, Lundy and Crawford by now. The fact that he’s not being matched against those guys is extremely confusing.
If you believe that Mitchell is the best, then why in the heck are you matching him against Estrada? It just makes me have a lot of doubt about Mitchell and Hearn when I see match-making like this instead of high quality match-making with Mitchell really being tested.
We’ve seen what happened with Mitchell in the past when he’s been moved up a rung in facing higher quality talent with him getting blasted out by an in his prime Ricky Burns and Michael Katsidis.
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