Saunders suffers cut in sparring, Andy Lee fight postponed – again!

By Boxing News - 09/01/2015 - Comments

saunders43By Scott Gilfoid: Bad luck continues to follow the fight between WBO middleweight champion Andy Lee (34-2-1, 24 KOs) and Billy Joe Saunders (22-0, 12 KOs). Saunders, 26, reportedly suffered a cut over one of his eyes during sparring for his October 10th fight, and the fight will now need to be postponed again, according to Boxing News Online.

The Lee-Saunders fight will now be rescheduled for either November or December depending on the estimated healing time for the cut.

Lee and Saunders were previously supposed to fight each other on September 19th, but the fight had to be postponed after Lee came down with an illness that interrupted his training for the fight.

We last saw Saunders fighting on July 24th in a fight in which Saunders weighed in at a very chubby looking 173¼ pounds in stopping the little known Yoann Bloyer in the 4th round at the Wembley Arena in London, UK.

Saunders looked a lot heavier than that during the actual fight. My guess is he was easily in the mid-180s on fight night against the 32-year-old Bloyer. As flabby and as out of shape as Saunders was for that fight, I had a feeling that it was going to be trouble for him to take off all the tonnage for his next fight with Lee. But here’s the good news; with Saunders suffering an eye injury, it will give him an extra 4 to 8 weeks to burn off all the blubber and come into the fight with Lee in tip top shape.

If Saunders had to fight Lee on October 10th, I think it would have been a rush job for Saunders in burning off all the lard that he put on before the Bloyer fight. As such, I think the injury for Saunders is the best thing that could have happened to him, because with the flab that he put on recently, I just don’t think he would have been able to take off the weight quickly enough for him to get down to 160.

Heck, Andy Lee might as well look for another opponent for a tune-up before he faces Saunders, because with all the postponements, it’s got to be hard on the 31-year-old Lee to stay sharp. He’s not as young as Saunders, and I think it potentially hurts Lee more than it does him with the fight date keep getting pushed forward over and over again.

What you don’t want to see is Lee having to wait an entire year to defend his title against Saunders, because that’s just too much time for an aging fighter to be out of the ring, especially against a guy who is kind of big for the weight class to begin with in Saunders. With the way that Saunders can put on weight, you can make an argument that the guy should be fighting in the super middleweight division rather than the middleweight division.

I’m just wondering how much longer Saunders will be able to boil down to make the 160lb weight limit. At some point, Saunders will hit a wall in his ability to burn off enough blubber and water weight to make 160. At that point, he’s going to have to either move up to super middleweight or light heavyweight. I see Saunders eventually winding up cruiserweight before his career is over, because I think it’s a bad sign that he’s blowing up in weight like this in between fights.

Lee has turned his career around lately with wins over Matt Korobov and John Jackson. In Lee’s last fight, he fought to a 12 round draw against Peter Quillin last April. Lee was very fortunate to get a draw out of that fight, because Quillin had Lee down twice in the early going in dropping him hard in the 1st and 3rd rounds. However, Quillin’s conditioning got to him in the 2nd half of the fight, as he ran out of gas, and this enabled Lee to come back enough to get a 12 round draw. Had Quillin been in the best of shape, I don’t think Lee would have won the fight.

IBO/WBA middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golokvin is hoping to fight the winner of the Lee-Saunders fight in a unification match in 2016. I find it extremely doubtful that Golovkin will be able to get either of these guys to agree to fight him, however. What we don’t want to see is the Lee vs. Saunders fight dragged into the ring kicking and screaming for a unification fight against Golovkin. It would look bad.



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