By Patrick McHugh: This Saturday night, Tom Doran (17-0, 7 KOs) will be facing the toughest opponent of his career in his fight against British middleweight champion Chris Eubank Jr. (22-1, 17 KOs) on June 25 at the O2 Arena in London, England. Eubank Jr. vs. Doran will be taking place on the Anthony Joshua vs. Dominic Breazeale card on Sky Box Office pay-per-view. In the eyes of most boxing fans, Doran is going to get badly beaten by Eubank Jr.
Doran has never been in with anyone close to the talent level of Eubank Jr., and he’s going to need to raise his game considerably to keep from getting knocked out and badly beaten by the 26-year-old Eubank Jr. There’s nothing in Doran’s track record that would suggest that he’s going to be able to pull an upset on Saturday night against Eubank Jr. This is a really dangerous fight because it’s such a mismatch on paper.
Up until now, Doran’s toughest fight of his career was against Luke Keeler last April. Doran won the fight by a 2nd round knockout after getting knocked down in the opening round.
Eubank Jr. needs a win over Doran to keep alive his dream of fighting unbeaten Gennady “GGG” Golovkin in September or October. Eubank Jr. wants that fight in the worst way because he feels he’s got the talent to hand Triple G his first loss of his career.
“I personally see weaknesses in his boxing style. There is no maybe about it. He’s 100 per cent beatable and I am the man to do it,” said Eubank Jr. about Golovkin to skysports.com.
If Golovkin is beatable, it’s still going to take very good effort from Eubank Jr. for him to hand him his first loss. Few boxing fans believe Eubank Jr. capable of defeating the 34-year-old Golovkin.
The reason why they doubt that Eubank Jr. can do the job on Golovkin is because of his loss to Billy Joe Saunders from 2014, and because of the way he’s looked since then in his fights against Dmitry Chudinov, Tony Jeter, Gary “O’Sullivan and Nick Blackwell. Those are not great opponents, and Eubank Jr. has looked beatable against those fighters.
There’s also the fact that Eubank Jr. has purposefully held himself back from fighting the upper echelon fighters like WBA middleweight champion Daniel Jacob. Eubank Jr. could have fought Jacobs after he fought for the mandatory spot last December against O’Sullivan and beat him soundly. Rather than going after the Jacobs fight, which he could have got, Eubank Jr. did an about face and chose to fight British champion Nick Blackwell. Eubank Jr. could have fought a Jacobs or taken on Saunders in a rematch. He didn’t do either of those things. Instead he went after Blackwell and won the British title, and now he’s in the process of defending it against Doran. There’s nothing wrong with a fighter choosing the British title patch, but it’s abnormal for fighters at Eubank’s level to take that patch.
Doran doesn’t have many knockouts on his resume, but he’s going to need to find some power somewhere for him to be able to have a chance of to defeat Eubank Jr. Additionally, it wouldn’t hurt if he chose to move a little in the fight because Eubank Jr. does well against stationary fighters.