By Scott Gilfoid: #12 WBA heavyweight contender Chris Arreola (36-4, 31 KOs) will be facing 35-year-old Fred Kassi (18-3, 10 KOs) in a 10 round bout on July 18th on Premier Boxing Champions (PBC) on CBS at the Don Haskins Center in El Paso, Texas.
The Arreola-Kassi fight will be on the same card as IBF super bantamweight champion Carl Frampton vs. Alejandro Gonzalez Jr.
Arreola, 34, has a chance for a world title fight against WBC heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder (34-0, 33 KOs) if Arreola beats Kassi. That’s a good payday that Arreola could get if he can somehow take care of business against Kassi. I’m not sure how many more paydays Arreola is going to get with his career at this point.
He’s got to take the bull by the horns and win the fight any way he can.
It’s an understatement to say that Arreola really needs a win in this fight to keep his career afloat, as he was beaten badly twice by Bermane Stiverne in 2013 and 2014.
In Arreola’s last fight against little known Curtis Harper last March, Arreola had to struggle hard to win the fight by an 8 round decision. It could be that Arreola’s poor conditioning resulted in him having to work hard for the win, or it might be that he’s starting to show signs of age.
Whatever the case, Arreola can’t afford to lose to Kassi if he wants to get another world title shot. The World Boxing Council is doing Arreola a big favor by keeping him I their top 15 at the No.12 spot, because those two losses to Stiverne and his poor performance against Harper should have been enough to drive Arreola out of the top 15.
Arreola can still punch. He doesn’t seem to have lost any of his punching power. The only thing that he’s having problems with is coming into his fights in condition at all times. He looked really flabby and badly out of shape against Harper, and there’s no way Arreola should have taken the fight as bad as he looked.
In his two losses to Stiverne, Arreola failed to use his jab or any kind of head movement. There was no improvement for Arreola from the first fight with Stiverne, and that’s pretty sad. It’s as if Arreola didn’t even watch the fight to figure what he did wrong. If he did his homework correctly, Arreola would have been jabbing like crazy and looking to set up single power shots. But what Arreola did wrong was plodding straight and trying to throw combinations. You don’t fight like that against Stiverne because he has too much power.
You have to stay on the outside, jab, move your head and throw one power punch at a time because he’s so good at countering his opponents with his left hook and right hand. Deontay got away with throwing combinations, but he was able to do that because he was throwing blinding fast flurries that were knocking Stiverne around from the impact. Arreola doesn’t have that kind of speed or punching power, so he should have been throwing only one shot at a time.
Kassi was knocked out in the 7th round by Amir Mansour in his last fight in November 2014. Kassi was asking for trouble all fight long by standing in front of Mansour rather than using a lot of movement. It was surprising that the fight lasted as long as it did because Kassi was there to be knocked out with the way he fought.
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