By Scott Gilfoid: WBA World light welterweight champion Ricky Burns (41-5-1, 14 KOs) says he won’t be fighting former four division world champion Adrien Broner (32-2, 24 Kos) until mid-2017. Broner, 27, has a fight on February 11 against contender Adrian Granados (18-4-2, 12 KOs) at a still to be determined venue. That’s not going to be an easy fight for Broner, but he’s still expected to win.
A fight between Burns and Broner would be a nice payday for both of them. It would be a very tough fight for the 33-year-old Burns to win, because he’s not much of a puncher to speak. Broner would likely walk him down and chop him to pieces. Burns was fortunate to win his last fight against #1 WBA Kiryl Relikh last October in their fight at the SSE Hydro in Glasgow, Scotland.
I think the only reason Burns won that fight was because Relikh waited too long to start attacking Burns in a fierce manner. Relikh waited until the 11th round to put pressure on Burns. By that point he was too far behind in the fight for him to come back to get the victory. It was poor planning on Relikh’s part by not going after Burns earlier in the fight the way that a good fighter would.
“The fight is still a possibility but it will not be until midway through next year or something,” said Burns to skysports.com about a fight against Broner. “I have had a couple of big wins and I would like to keep the momentum going. There has been a lot of interest in it. The [Broner] fight was meant to happen when we were both at super-feather and lightweight, and now up again.”
Burns needs to make sure the fight with Broner happens while it still has any meaning, because once he loses his title to one of the contenders, then it’s unlikely that the boxing fans will care about a fight between these two. Burns dodged a bullet against Relikh, because that could have just as easily been a loss for Burns if the Belarusian fighter had fought with some intelligence in that fight by attacking more instead of waiting until the last two rounds to finally mount his attack.
Now that Burns has gotten his mandatory out of the way with his win over Relikh, he can now take a soft title-milking opponent for his next fight. There are plenty of easy marks for Burns to pick up some easy wins while he waits for the fight against Broner to happen in 2017. Burns has turned his career around in his last four fights in beating Relikh, Michelle Di Rocco, Josh King and Prince Ofotsu.
Before that, Burns had lost three out of his previous four fights in losses to Omar Figueroa, Terence Crawford and Dedan Zlaticanin. I wouldn’t say that Burns has gotten better since then. I would say that his opposition has gotten worse, a lot worse. You can argue that the only decent fighter of the last four opponents Burns fought was Relkh, who had good punching power, but very little experience against quality opposition and not the great game plan.
“I fought in Texas before but I have always said I would love to go and fight in Vegas,” said Burns. “I’ve been there on holiday a few times and I don’t see the point going anywhere else now. To walk out in one of those venues over there would be a dream come true.”
There’s very little chance Burns’s promoter Eddie Hearn will be able to get Broner to come to Glasgow to take the fight unless they throw a ton of money at him. That’s obviously not going to happen. Broner is going to want the Burns match to take place in the U.S. in a place like Las Vegas or perhaps New York. That way Broner wouldn’t find himself in a position where he needs a knockout to make sure he gets the win. The boxing fans saw what happened to Raymundo Beltran in his fight against Burns in appearing to beat him, but then having to settle for a draw.
When Burns is fighting in Glasgow, he’s pretty much unbeatable. He’s really hard to beat. The good news for Broner is he has the punching power to make sure he gets the win over Burns, but I’m not sure that he’ll be able to use his power if he can’t catch up to Burns. Relikh had to literally run after Burns in order to land his shots in the 11th and 12th. It took Relikh that long to figure out that he needed to actually chase Burns in a running mode for him to land his shots. Just pursuing him around the ring wasn’t enough. Relikh had to actually double time around the ring to catch up to Burns.
WBC/WBO 140lb champion Terence Crawford wants to fight Burns, but I’m not sure the fight is really worth it for Burns to take it. This won’t be a big money fight, and Burns might be better off defending his title against the normal contenders rather than agreeing to fight Crawford in a unification fight.