By Aaron Klein: With last Saturday’s terribly unimpressive wins for both IBF junior welterweight champion Paulie Malignaggi and former champion Ricky Hatton, it looks as if we’re about to see a matchup between the two of them, most likely in November. However, it all depends on whether Malignaggi’s injury to his right hand ( a knuckle injury) has healed by then. Either way, we’ll still likely be forced to watch Hatton challenge Malignaggi for his IBF title at some point in the future, because it looks as if Hatton has decided upon him as his best option (read: easiest) for a title shot. However, it’s really unfortunate that Hatton has decided on taking on Malignaggi rather than the other three junior welterweight champions, in particular WBC title holder Timothy Bradley and WBO champion Ricardo Torres, both of which are much more dangerous and hard-hitting than the weak-punching Malignaggi.

Besides that, neither of them have the baggage that Malignaggi has, who has won two fights in a row by very narrow, questionable decisions. If you take one visit to practically any boxing forum on the internet, you’d be hard pressed to find one fan that felt that Malignaggi had defeated either of his past two opponents, Herman Ngoudjo and Lovemore N’dou. In each case, Malignaggi appeared to lose by a round or two, yet was given the decision both times. However, it’s not hard to understand why he would continue to get the nod by the judges, since he’s hugely popular in the East Coast where he resides.

My guess is that the fan population on the East coast most likely backs him out of regional loyalty rather than on his style of fighting, which is more of non-crowd pleasing finesse style. Whatever it is, I can’t see the attraction myself. It’s just sad to see Hatton reduced to taking the easiest fight, rather than risking his record and reputation by fighting a tougher fighter like the aforementioned Torres and Bradley. It isn’t like Hatton couldn’t get a fight with either of them, because all he’d have to say is “I’m interested,” and both of them would drop whatever fights they have in a second to fight him, knowing that it would bring them their biggest payday of their careers.

For Hatton, it would be the smart move for him to take, which would allow him to deflect a lot of the criticism that has come his way for avoiding Junior Witter all these years. A lot of fans felt that Hatton was afraid if Witter, who called him out on a constant basis, only to be rebuffed. In Hatton’s bout last Saturday night, he was hurt on two occasions in the bout – the 8th and 10th – and in the 10th round, the referee stopped the fight to give both a warning to Juan Lazcano about pushing down Hatton’s head (even though Lazcano didn’t appear to be doing that at the time) and Hatton time to have his shoelaces re-tied.

The timing for the stoppage was most peculiar given the fact that it directly coincided with him being hurt badly and on the verge of a knockout. In all the years I’ve been following boxing, I’ve only seen that happen once or twice and always with it with a lot of negative feedback from fans. This, unfortunately, is no exception, for Hatton looked to be in about as bad a shape as he was in the 10th round when he got tagged by a check left hook by Floyd Mayweather Jr. last December in their WBC welterweight title bout. Hatton, as most people already know, was eventually stopped later in the round after going down twice.

However, Hatton appeared to doge a bullet on Saturday night while fighting in front of his home audience in Manchester, England. For me, it seems like the logical thing for Hatton to do is to stay away from Malignaggi, because beating him won’t increase his worth to the fans, which will largely see it as a move to avoid the more dangerous Bradley and Torres. Hatton needs to take away the stain of last Saturday’s fight, I think, and also erase the image of him being afraid to take on the top fighters in the division. I don’t know how or why he was able to fight all these years without taking on Witter, Miguel Cotto or Torres, but clearly that’s something that he needed to have done.

Most people would say that Hatton’s best win of his career was against Kostya Tszyu, yet that win is pretty much an empty one in my book, considering that Tyszyu was at the end of his career and hadn’t fought regularly in quite some time. This is why it’s important that Hatton try to break from that patter and due the brave thing, and ignore a fight with Malignaggi, and instead go for Bradley or Torres. Of the two, Bradley is the bigger threat and the one that would give Hatton the biggest shot in the arm should he win. Many people, me included with them, don’t feel that Hatton can no longer beat a fighter in the class of Bradley. The way Hatton looked the other night, Bradley would have stopped him well before the 10th round, and there wouldn’t have anything a referee could have done to slow him down from making that happening.