By Scott Gilfoid: After watching James DeGale (6-0, 4 KO’s) and Nathan Cleverly (19-0, 9 KO’s) last weekend dispatch a couple of easy foes, I really don’t see either of them being good enough in the future to win a major title in any of the divisions. There’s something missing with both of them that I think will ultimately hamper their progress in capturing a title. Oh, I have no doubts that DeGale and Cleverly are good enough to win one of the obscure NABO whatchamacalit titles, but as far as a major title goes, I just don’t see it happening. DeGale beat some guy named Matthew Barr last Saturday night in a 2nd round TKO win.

I didn’t see much from that performance that tells me that DeGale will ever be able to beat a good middleweight like Kelly Pavlik or Felix Sturm. Frankly, I would fear for DeGale if he was to be put in with either of those two fighters. DeGale’s punches are too wide, too slow and too slapping to compete against the likes of Pavlik and Sturm in my view.

Pavlik would probably decapitate DeGale with a big right hand after walking him down in a round or two. And Sturm would eat DeGale alive with straight jabs down the middleweight and hard rights to the head. DeGale looks too wild, clumsy and all over the place. He needs to learn how to fight and become more compacted. What I saw of DeGale on Saturday seemed to me to be a poor man’s version of Naseem Hamed.

But in the case of Hamed, he had world class power with either hand. I saw mostly slapping shots from DeGale and punches that looked more like cuffing blows than knockout shots. He beat the dude that he was put in with, but I think DeGale is going to be in for a world of hurt once he’s set up with a halfway decent middleweight like Daniel Jacobs or Winky Wright.

Maybe DeGale needs to go on a weight lifting regimen to build up power or something. I don’t know but he needs to do something to find some power before he’s thrown in the deep end with a good middleweight who will be looking to tear his head off instead of just flopping around on the canvas.

Cleverly looks to be the better fighter of two, but in a million years, I can’t see Cleverly beating fighters like Jean Pascal, Tavoris Cloud, Chad Dawson, Bernard Hopkins, Glen Johnson or even an old Roy Jones Jr. Cleverly is missing the big kind of power he would need to beat those guys in my estimation.

The good thing he has going for him is that he’s only 22, and can wait them out, but even if he sticks around for another eight years or so, there will probably be a bunch of younger dudes coming up that will be just as much of a problem for Cleverly as Pascal, Cloud, Dawson, Hopkins, Jones and Johnson. Cleverly needs more power to get him to the next level, because he looks too weak to me. Maybe he should move down in weight to the super middleweight division. Who knows? Cleverly might be able to have more power at the lower weight. I doubt it, but it’s worth a try.