Theophane: I can beat Adrien Broner

By Boxing News - 01/02/2016 - Comments

broner64By Scott Gilfoid: 35-year-old unranked British fighter Ashley Theophane (39-6-1, 11 KOs) is highly motivated for his potential world title shot against WBA light welterweight champion Adrien “The Problem” Broner (31-2, 23 KOs) for their proposed fight in February or March of this year. Theophane wants to prove all the doubters wrong about him, and he wants to show the 26-year-old Broner that he’s not an “easy money” fight as he says on Twitter.

Broner wanted to be the one to face Filipino superstar Manny Pacquiao for his next fight on April 9th on HBO pay-per-view, but instead Broner got passed over by Pacquiao’s 84-year-old promoter Bob Arum, who went with one of his own Top Rank stable fighters Tim Bradley for a third fight.

The fact that Arum was willing to put Pacquiao in with a fighter that the boxing public has zero interest in seeing was a knock on Broner, because he should have a high enough following to bring in more fans for a Pacquiao fight compared to a third painful to watch Pacquiao-Bradley fight.

“We’ll see if I’m ‘easy money’ or whether we’ll hear ‘and the new’. His words just motivate me to work harder in the ring and on the road,” Theophane said to skysports.com. “I do believe I can beat him [Broner]. He’s shown his weakness against fighters like Shawn and Marcos, who are active. The blueprint is there.”

It is definitely true that Broner suffered defeats at the hands of Marcos Maidana in 2013 and Shawn Porter in 2015. However, those fighters are far above Theophane’s talent level, so it’s kind of pointless for him to mention those defeats that Broner has suffered, because it’s not as if he has the talent to duplicate what they did. I mean, I seriously doubt that Maidana and Porter would lose to a fighter like Darren Hamilton, who easily beat Theophane by a one-sided 12 round unanimous decision in 2012 to take his British light welterweight title. The last time I checked, Theophane never avenged that loss for some reason. Hamilton has since been beaten by 2nd tier fighter Curtis Woodhouse.

What we don’t know is whether the World Boxing Association will even let Broner fight a 2nd tier guy like Theophane. You would think that the WBA would choose not to sanction a mismatch between Broner and a non-top 15 ranked fighter like Theophane. We don’t even know if Showtime would agree to televise a fight like this.

To be sure, if Showtime says no to the Broner-Theophane mismatch, then I guess the fight would then be televised on Premier Boxing Champions, but what a terrible mismatch. I just hope this isn’t something that we’re going to be seeing more of in the future from Broner. He seemed somewhat bitter after his recent win over Khalib Allakhverdiev last October in saying that he’s not going to be fighting the guys that they want him to fight anymore.

YouTube video

Instead, Broner says he’s going to be fighting the guys that he wants to fight. Broner appears to be talking about him fighting Shawn Porter and suffering a loss. I guess the idea behind Broner fighting the guys he wants to fight is he can pick weaker opposition like Theophane and pad his record and not lose for a long time if he fights the guys he wants to fight. That would be so, so sad if that’s what Broner is going to be doing.

“I’m not going to beat him by trying to outbox him,” Theophane said about Broner.” I have to be in there working and making him uncomfortable. He has flashy skills but he needs more than that. We’ve seen that. He’s got a good chin but if fighters keep working against him, he doesn’t like that.”

I don’t think Theophane has the punching power to attack Broner and put him under the kind of pressure that Maidana and Porter both did. Theophane also doesn’t have the inside game or the workrate that those fighters do. As such, if Theophane comes directly at Broner, he’s going to be getting nailed with his best shots and he won’t ave the punching power or the work rate to make him uncomfortable. I can see Broner whipping Theophane in a gleeful manner as he clowns and showboats to the audience. This could very well be a similar fight to Broner’s easy win over little Carlos Molina.



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