By Eric Thomas: This Saturday former IBF light welterweight champion Ricky Hatton (43-1, 31 KOs) makes his return to the ring to face Mexican fighter Juan Lazcano (37-4-1, 27 KOs) in a 12-round bout in Manchester, England. It’s been five months since Hatton, 29, was totally destroyed by WBC welterweight champion Floyd Mayweather Jr. on December 8th, a bout that was never remotely close despite that Hatton has said recently about the first six rounds having been close. Sounding like he has a major chip on his shoulder still from the loss to Mayweather, Hatton has said that he is out to prove to people that he’s no quitter, which presumably is why he’s chosen the 32 year-old Lazcano as an opponent rather than a weaker fighter than him.
However, Lazcano has fought most of his career as a lightweight and only recently in the past couple of years moved up to the light welterweight division, where he’s currently not ranked in the top 15. This seems to suggest that Hatton is scrapping the bottom of the barrel, picking a fighter naturally smaller than him to ensure that he gets the win. In a way, it’s similar to what Oscar De La Hoya did recently in facing Steve Forbes, who fought mostly as a light welterweight in his career and was clearly undersized against De La Hoya, a natural light middleweight.
I suppose it would be okay if this was a onetime thing for Hatton. However, he appears to have no plans of stepping it up against the top fighters in the division – Timothy Bradley and Junior Witter – after this fight, and instead has mentioned wanting to fight Paulie Malignaggi.
Though Malignaggi is one of the current light welterweight champions (IBF), he isn’t considered to be one of the best of the bunch. Indeed, of the four champion, he appears to be the weakest of the bunch and is perhaps lucky to have a belt at all given his recent questionable decision over challenger Herman Ngoudjo. Hatton, however, rather than face better light welterweights like Ricardo Torres, Andreas Kotelnik and the aforementioned Bradley, will be settling for Malignaggi. Of course, we’re getting ahead of ourselves here, as Hatton has to first get by this Saturday’s opponent Lazcano, but it’s difficult to see that fight as being anything other than a win for Hatton because of the numerous factors that he has in his favor going into the bout.
Other than his likely still fragile ego, which took a major hit with his wipe out at the hands of Mayweather, there’s very little reason not to think that he’ll win against Lazcano on Saturday. Like I mentioned, it is disappointing that he’s decided to play it safe once more by picking a relative soft opponent. Then again, much of his career has been one of him playing it safe, avoiding a prime Witter, not fighting Torres or Miguel Cotto, and then waiting until Kotya Tszyu was at the tail end of his career to fight him.