Vasyl Lomachenko vs. Nicholas Walters this Saturday

By Boxing News - 11/21/2016 - Comments

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By Chris Williams: WBO super featherweight champion Vasyl Lomachenko (6-1, 4 KOs) will be defending his title this Saturday night against unbeaten former WBA featherweight champion Nicholas “Axe Man” Walters (26-0-1, 21 KOs) in the biggest fight of his career on HBO Boxing from the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The Lomachenko-Walters fight has a start time at 10:35 p.m. ET/PT. It should be a good fight. Walters is the underdog, but it doesn’t matter. It’s an even fight. Walters just needs to make sure the fight doesn’t go to the cards, because he’s clearly the B-side in this fight. Walters needs to make sure he leaves no doubt who the better fighter is between the two if he wants to rip Lomachenko’s WBO title from him.

A win for Walters would be great news for his career, because it would give him a title and show that he’s still a great fighter.

Walters will have a huge reach and power advantage over Lomachenko. If Walters can use his reach to land his bombs from the outside, he could give the Ukrainian Lomachenko his second loss of his career. I just hope that we don’t hear excuses if Lomachenko gets beaten about how he was the smaller man.

We heard all that junk after Lomachenko’s loss to Orlando Salido in 2014. Lomachenko was battered to the body by Salido for 12 rounds and forced to clinch like crazy. If Walters does the same thing to Lomachenko, I just don’t want to hear excuses coming from him or his loyal boxing fans. They need to accept that Walters is the better fighter.

Here are the keys to victory for Walters:

– Keep Lomachenko on the outside all night long so he can’t land his counters.

– Chase Lomachenko down when he runs, which may be much of the time. Lomachenko likes to hit and run. He’s not going to stand in the pocket against a big puncher like Walters, believe me. That’s why it’s extremely important for Walters to go after Lomachenko, and not let him run around the ring.

– Use your jab and long reach to blind Lomachenko. With a reach as long as Walters’, he needs to use that as an asset to sting Lomachenko with shots all night long. If Walters can cut Lomachenko with one of his jabs, he can then work on the cut and force a stoppage. Even if Walters doesn’t get a stoppage, the blood from a cut from Lomachenko could blind him and make it difficult for him to get out of the way of Walters’ big power shots.

Lomachenko has won his last five matches since being whipped by Orlando Salido in 2015. In Lomachenko’s last fight, he defeated World Boxing Organization super featherweight champion Roman “Rocky” Martinez by a 5th round knockout in June of this year. The victory was a good one the 28-year-old Lomachenko, but you must realize that Martinez had just gone through two very, very punishing fights against Orlando Salido.

Martinez really should have taken some time off to rest after those two tough fights before being matched against Lomachenko. Those were really hard fights for Martinez. Salido lost the first and was held to a controversial draw in the second. I had Salido winning both fights. Never the less, Martinez was hit so much by Salido. It was scary to watch how much punishment Salido dished out to Martinez. That’s why I think it was a bad idea for Martinez to have faced Lomachenko earlier this year, because he looked depleted to me in that fight. Lomachenko probably would have still beaten Martinez even if he was at his best, but I think it would have been a lot tougher.

This is a must win fight for the 28-year-old Lomachenko, because he cannot afford to lose it if he wants to stay in contention for a big money match against fellow Top Rank fighter Manny Pacquiao. Their promoter Bob Arum has two guys that he badly wants to match Pacquiao up against before he retires from boxing. One of them is Lomachenko, and the other is WBC/WBO light welterweight champion Terence Crawford (29-0, 20 KOs). Not surprisingly, Arum promotes both Lomachenko and Crawford, which you can argue is the chief reason why he wants to match them against Pacquiao.

Never the less, if Lomachenko loses to Walters, it would foul up a potential fight against Pacquiao. That doesn’t mean that Lomachenko won’t still get to fight Pacquiao. Arum has matched guys from his stable coming off of a loss against Pacquiao before, and I don’t see that being a deal breaker from doing it again.

It’s just that it would likely cause interest in a Pacquiao vs. Lomachenko fight to be quite low. It might result in the fight bringing in a similar amount of pay-per-view buys as the recent Pacquiao vs. Jessie Vargas fight, which reportedly did around 300,000 buys. That might not be great compared to Pacquiao’s pay-per-view numbers that he used to bring in during his best years, but it might be enough to satisfy Arum.

There’s no one else in Arum’s table to match Lomachenko up against for a PPV fight, because he’s not a PPV type of fighter. It’s Pacquiao or no one. What’s interesting is that Arum hasn’t been mentioning the 30-year-old Walters as a possibility for a fight against Pacquiao for some reason. It would make sense for Arum to mention both Walters and Lomachenko as possibilities for Pacquiao to fight in his next fight rather than just Lomachenko.

It would sound better. But in the case of Walters, he’s not a two-time Olympic gold medalist from Ukraine like Lomachenko. The story doesn’t sound nearly as good if Arum sticks Walters in with Pacquiao compared to if he matches Lomachenko against him. Arum can’t say that Walters is a two-time Olympic champion, because he’s not. Walters is just a very good former WBA featherweight champion, who lost his WBA title in 2015 after he failed to make weight for his fight against Miguel Marriaga. Walters still won the fight with ease in beating Marriaga by a 12 round unanimous decision by the scores 118-109, 117-110 and 119-108.

#8 WBO Walters is coming off of a controversial 12 round draw against Jason Sosa last December. I had Walters winning that fight. He just off to a bad start in the first half of the contest when he stood in front of Sosa and tried to trade power shots with him. I still thought Walters was the better fighter of the two in the first five rounds, but the judges felt differently. Walters came on strong in the last five rounds when he started using his boxing skills to dominate the action. He looked really good when he was fighting like that.