Cunningham and Hernandez will fight for Ring title on 2/4

By Boxing News - 01/09/2012 - Comments

Image: Cunningham and Hernandez will fight for Ring title on 2/4By Jim Dower: With WBO cruiserweight champion Marco Huck moving up to face WBA heavyweight champion Alexander Povetkin next month, this will open his Ring cruiserweight title for Steve Cunningham (24-3, 12 KO’s) and IBF cruiserweight champion Yoan Pablo Hernandez (25-1, 13 KO’s) to fight for next month on February 4th, according to RingTV writer Michael Rosenthal.

Huck current is #1 in the Ring rankings with Hernandez #2, and Cunningham #3. But it’s unclear whether Huck will stay at heavyweight if he beats Povetkin. He’s talking about wanting to fight the Klitschko brothers and then come back down to fight a rematch with Denis Lebedev at cruiserweight. If he loses to Povetkin, Huck will have little other choice but to come back down to the cruiserweight division and resume defending his WBO title. He won’t be stripped for taking the fight with Povetkin but he will he stays at heavyweight for any length of time.

The Cunningham-Hernandez fight is now that much more interesting with the Ring title now up for grabs. The fight itself should be an exciting bout because of all the back and forth action last time when they met in October 2011. The German based Hernandez won enough rounds in the early part of the fight to barely get the nod when the fight was prematurely halted in the 6th after a clash of heads opened up a big cut between his eyes.

However, Cunningham was fighting quite effectively at the time and he looked as if he was taking charge of the fight and may have been able get a stoppage in the second half of the fight had it gone further. Hernandez has to be able to fighter and throw more punches in the rematch if he wants to win this fight because he looked vulnerable after the 2nd round.

The southpaw Hernandez has excellent technical skills and good size at 6’4”, but he’s someone that can look really good in one fight and then turn and struggle in his next. Against Cunningham, Hernandez gave him too much respect after hurting him in the 1st round and didn’t really put a big effort into taking him out in the 2nd when Cunningham was still a little groggy from having been knocked to the canvas in the 1st. That was a tactical error on Hernandez’s part by not trying to finish the job. He can’t let the 35-year-old Cunningham hang around and fight at a slow pace because that’s the way he likes to fight and he’s good at it.



Comments are closed.