Carl Frampton vs. Andres Gutierrez cancelled!

By Boxing News - 07/28/2017 - Comments

Image: Carl Frampton vs. Andres Gutierrez cancelled!

By Scott Gilfoid: Carl Frampton (23-1, 14 KOs) vs. Andres Gutierrez (35-1-1, 25 KOs) fight has been canceled due to an accident the 24-year-old Gutierrez suffered. The fight what was supposed to have been a WBC featherweight title eliminator on Saturday night at the SSE Arena in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Frampton had already failed to make weight for the fight in coming in over the 126lb limit during Friday’s weigh-in. Frampton weighed in at 127lbs.

It’s unclear whether Frampton and Gutierrez will reschedule their fight. I don’t see why they would. Frampton is interested in fighting IBF featherweight champion Lee Selby. It didn’t matter if Frampton had made weight for the Gutierrez fight. The Frampton-Selby fight is expected to take place in late 2017. Frampton will have a good chance of beating Selby unless he gets old overnight. I hope for Frampton’s sake that he at least makes weight for the Selby fight.

If Frampton can no longer make weight for the featherweight division, then he’s got some tough decisions to make about his boxing career. The super featherweight division is loaded with talent from top to bottom. I hate to say it, but I can’t see Frampton beating the likes of Vasyl Lomachenko, Miguel Berchelt, Gervonta Davis and Jezreel Corrales. Those guys are just as big as Frampton, but they’re fighting at high level and haven’t been recently like him.

Part of what has made Frampton such a good fighter in the super bantamweight and featherweight di visions is how big he’d get after he rehydrated for those weight classes. Frampton would look like a little tank after he rehydrated. If Frampton must move up to super featherweight, he might not be the same fighter he was once. Frampton would need to learn to become more of a finesse fighter instead of a slugger. At 30, Frampton is a little long in the tooth to be changing his fighting style. The saying, ‘old dogs can’t learn new tricks,’ might apply here.

It’s not good that Frampton couldn’t even make weight for the Gutierrez fight. Frampton lost his last fight in getting out-boxed by Leo Santa Cruz on January 28. For all intents and purposes, that was Frampton’s second consecutive defeat at the hands of Santa Cruz. Frampton’s controversial 12 round majority decision win over Santa Cruz in their first fight on July 30 last year was a robbery in my opinion. I had Santa Cruz winning that fight easily. However, the fight took place in front of a large pro-Frampton crowd in New York. It was the oddest thing. You would think that America Santa Cruz would be the home fighter fighting in the U.S, but New York has a large community of Irish boxing fans. Santa Cruz’s management made a blunder in agreeing to fight Frampton in New York. That’s a move that they should have done some research on before agreeing to that. In the rematch in Las Vegas, Nevada, the crowd was more evenly split between the two fighters. As such, the judges did a heck of a good job in scoring the fight in giving it to Santa Cruz.