By Allan Fox: Middleweight prospect Felix Cash is giving Billy Joe Saunders a good chance of defeating superstars Gennady ‘GGG’ Golovkin and Saul Canelo Alvarez. Cash was impressed with Saunders’s recent win over David Lemieux in Canada. Cash feels that Saunders showed what he’s capable of doing when he’s in excellent shape.
“If you put Billy Joe Saunders in with GGG or Canelo, he’s got a good a chance as any man,” said Cash to IFL TV.
Cash isn’t the only one that believes that the 28-year-old Saunders has a chance of defeating Canelo and Golovkin. There are now a number of fans that have jumped aboard the Saunders’ hype wagon after his 12 round unanimous decision over Lemieux (38-4, 33 KOs) Kos).
Despite his nice win over Lemieux, Saunders (26-0, 12 KOs) is still largely unproven in the eyes of Golovkin’s trainer Abel Sanchez, who feels that he beat a limited fighter in Lemieux. Sanchez says that Saunders was looking bad just 2 fights ago in his match against Artur Akavov. Saunders only started looking good after he was matched against Lemieux.
Saunders has the chance to show the people that he’s the real McCoy by fighting a worthy option in his next fight in the first quarter of 2018. If Saunders beats a decent opponent for his next fight, he’ll show that his win over Lemieux wasn’t a fluke thing, and that he deserves to share the same ring with Triple G and Canelo. Right now, the journey is still out on whether Saunders can hang with Canelo and Golovkin. Saunders only has the win over Lemieux to show the boxing world that he belongs inside the ring with GGG and Alvarez.
Jacobs and his trainer Andre Rozier have both called out Saunders for April of 2018. They would like Saunders to come over to the U.S and fight on HBO Boxing in New York. This would be a wonderful opportunity for Saunders to showcase his skills, and to force the winner of the Canelo-Golovkin fight to face him inside the squared circle.
The way things are now, the Canelo-Golovkin winner can ignore Saunders without being heavily criticized by the boxing world. Saunders’ win over Lemieux wasn’t a big enough victory to create the kind of pressure needed by the fans to force the Canelo vs. GGG winner to take the fight with him.
By fighting so defensively, Saunders might have hurt his chances of getting Canelo or Golovkin to give him a fight next year. Saunders was doing a lot of spoiling in the same way that Erislandy Lara did in his fight with Canelo in 2014. Canelo wants no part of fighting Lara again because he made their fight unwatchable. Canelo probably isn’t going to want to fight Lara 2.0 in facing Saunders. Golovkin is the only that Saunders has a good chance of fighting next year, and that’s only because he wants to unify the middleweight division.
Saunders wants the chance to prove he’s the best middleweight in the division next year. If he can beat at least one more guy, he could place himself in the position to do just that.
