By Erik Schmidt: On Saturday night, we may be seeing the best cruiserweight in all of boxing when undefeated Alexander Alexeev (15-0, 14 KOs) defends his WBO Inter-Continental cruiserweight title against veteran Rob Calloway (70-7, 56 KOs) in a scheduled 12-round bout at the Color Line Arena, Altona, in Hamburg, Germany. Alexeev, a former 2005 amateur World champion and who participated in the 2004 Olympics for Russia, has moved up at light speed since turning professional in 2006. Originally, Alexeev came from Uzbekistan, but moved to Germany in 2006 where he trains with legendary German trainer Fritz Sdunek, the original professional trainers for Wladimir and Vitali Klitschko.

Alexeev, ranked #2 in the WBO, #12 in the IBF, #9 in the WBA and #10 in the WBC, is facing his best opponent to date in the 39 year-old Calloway, a former heavyweight who has faced a number of quality fighters in his day such as Ruslan Chagaev, Hasim Rahman and Audley Harrison. Always undersized for a heavyweight, Calloway finally moved to the heavyweight division in 2007, where he’s won nine out of his last ten fights with one fight ending in a draw.

Alexeev, 27, a southpaw boxer who moves well on the outside, and fights very much like most former fighters from the Soviet Union, keeping his hands up in front of him and throwing hard, short punches without needing to wind up on them like most boxers. In other words, he throws a lot of jabs on the move, and hooks off the jab frequently, a lot like Wladimir Klitschko, except that Alexeev throws much more uppercuts and hooks than Wladimir does.

Alexeev also moved much better and is an excellent counter puncher. His power is quite good, although not as nearly as hard as former cruiserweight champion David Haye. However, where Alexeev is better than Haye is with his ability to fight on the move, whether backwards, laterally or forwards and he’s very difficult to predict what type of punch and from what positions he’ll be throwing his punches from.

In his last fight, against Louis Azille on May 31st, Alexeev made easy work of the tough Azille, knocking him down three times, once in the first and twice second round before the fight was stopped by the referee. Alexeev carved Azille up with right hooks and straight lefts until the 2nd round, when he began hurting him with uppercuts to the head and hooks to the body. Azille, who came into the fight having lost four out of his last five bouts, never had a chance against Alexeev and the victory for the Russian was almost a bygone conclusion going into the fight.

In his other recent fights, Alexeev has destroyed Talmadge Griffis, Francisco Alvarez and Darrin Humphrey all within four rounds or less. Calloway is clearly a step above them, but it’s not clear how much better. Calloway has been very active in the past couple of years, fighting seven times in 2007, and five times already in 2008, but the level of his competition has been very poor to say the least. He did, however, look good in beating Terry Smith in August 2007, beating him in a grueling 10-round unanimous decision. However, Alexeev would appear to be a couple levels above Smith at this point, which means that unless Calloway fights much better than he did on that night, he’s going to be having problems against Alexeev on Saturday night.