Postol: I’m ready to fight Crawford

By Boxing News - 10/04/2015 - Comments

postol45(Photo credit: Sumio Yamada) By Dan Ambrose: Last night, Viktor Postol (28-0, 12 KOs) defeated Lucas Matthysse (37-4, 34 KOs) by a 10th round knockout to win the vacant WBC light welterweight title at the StubHub Center in Carson, California. Postol, 31, made easy work of Matthysse in totally schooling him before scoring a 10th round knockout.

Matthysse went out on his knee rather than going out on his shield like a warrior. With this victory, Postol is now looking for an opponent for his next fight. He says he would be interested in facing WBO light welterweight champion Terence Crawford (26-0, 18 KOs) if he’s open to the fight.

Postol says he wanted to fight Crawford recently instead of Matthysse, but Crawford or his management chose not to take the fight. Postol, 5’11”, says he’d be interested in taking the fight with Crawford right now.

“Before this fight, nobody knows this, but I had an offer to fight Terence Crawford for his WBO title,” Postol said to secondsout. “I had a choice to either fight Matthysse for a mandatory or fight him for the WBO title, and he we said yes. We said yes to the fight, but they changed their mind. Crawford didn’t want to fight me. I don’t know why, but I’m open to fight him right now,” Crawford said.

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Crawford has a fight this month on October 24th against lightweight Dierry Jean (29-1, 20 KOs) on HBO from the CenturyLink Center, in Omaha, Nebraska. It’s not much of a fight, as Jean is moving up from the lightweight division to take the fight, and he has little chance of winning. Whether Crawford will wind up facing Postol or not will come down to their promoter Bob Arum. I’m not sure if Arum will want to sacrifice one of those fighters because someone will have to lose, and right now I think he’d rather keep them in separate lanes so that he can have two future stars instead of just one.

“My emotions are overfilling me right now,” Postol said via Fight News. “This is a lifelong dream. Seven years as a pro and now I’m a world champion. I can’t believe it. I feel like I’m still a young fighter and I feel this is only the beginning.”

Postol won’t always have it this easy to win fights. Matthysse is a small guy and he fought a stupid fight by not fighting Postol in the clinches enough, and running out of gas in the 2nd half of the fight. If Postol doesn’t fight Crawford in a unification fight, he’ll soon have to face #3 WBC Amir Iman and #5 WBC Ruslan Provodnikov. Those are both big punchers, and Postol won’t be able to count on them mentally quitting against him like Matthysse did. Provodnikov would keep coming without stop, and the 5′ 10½ Imam would have the size and the reach to fight Postol on even terms from the outside.

You can say that Imam would be able to fight Postol at more than even terms from the outside because he’s got much better punching power and hand speed than Postol. The only advantage that Postol would have is his ability to hold all night long. That’s not going to help him against Imam because he’s someone that fights on the outside. He doesn’t need to come in really close in order to land his shots like Matthysse.

“Matthysse is a great, great fighter. This was probably the first fight where I was very, very calm, not nervous. I knew 100% I was going to win the fight,” Postol said. “People call him the best in the 140lb division, one of the top-pound-for-pounders…Believe it or not, I thought he was going to get up, but I guess I’m a big knockout guy also.”

Postol shouldn’t kid himself about him being a knockout puncher. He’d not. He just had a much shorter fighter in there with him last night in 5’6 ½”, and Matthysse just mentally quit after the 7th round. I think it was a combination of things that made Matthysse quit. I think it was a combination of him not being able to connect with his shots, get close, and the grueling fight he went through last April against Provodnikov. I think it was too soon for Matthysse to come back from that fight to face someone as tough as Postol.

“I want to unify the titles. Fight the best…in the ring, I was told there is a big star out there in WBO champion Terence Crawford,” Postol said. “I’m ready to fight him. The question is, is he ready to fight me?”



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