By Sean McDaniel: Boxing fans no doubt are looking forward to a future bout between Juan Manuel Lopez and Yuriorkis Gamboa (17-0, 15 KO’s) after watching both of these fighters easily take care of their opponents tonight at Madison Square Garden in New York. Don’t go holding your breath waiting for this fight to happen, though. Top Rank promoter Bob Arum is likely to get as much mileage as he can out of both Lopez and Gamboa before pitting them in against other.

Arum, the owner of Top Rank, promotes both fighter and he’s probably not going to want to ruin things by having one of them devalued by getting beaten. After watching how easily World Boxing Association featherweight champion Gamboa sliced through challenger Rogers Mtagwa tonight, stopping him in the 2nd round, I would have to believe that Gamboa would be far too much for the slender Lopez to deal with at this point.

Lopez, 5’7”, is two inches taller than Gamboa, but he is not as muscular, powerful or nearly as fast as Gamboa. This could be a terrible mismatch like the vast majority of Gamboa’s previous 17 fights have been thus far. Lopez, the WBO super bantamweight and now the WBO featherweight champion, looked good in defeating Steven Luevano tonight by a 7th round TKO, but his performance pales compared to the explosive efforts by Gamboa.

Lopez is much more of a technician compared to Gamboa and gets by on his smooth boxing skills rather than speed or power. Gamboa has great boxing ability as well, but it’s overshadowed both his tremendous speed and power. Gamboa basically runs over his opponents rather than beating them by skills alone.

Before we see a future fight between Gamboa and Lopez, you can bet that Arum will want to first exhaust all the potential opponents out there for either of them. In the case of Lopez, he still has super bantamweight champions Celestino Caballero and Toshiaki Nishiaoka to fight for unification fights at that weight. The Caballero fight could be a huge fight if they let play it right.

Gamboa still has Chris John, Mario Santiago, Israel Vazquez and Daniel Ponce De Leon to fight. Some of those fighters are also in play for Lopez now that he’s holding down the WBO featherweight title after winning it tonight. After all of these fights are exhausted, then and only then will boxing fans possibly see Lopez vs. Gamboa. There won’t be any other fighters to compete against by then and a fight between Gamboa and Lopez would be huge by that time.