By Jim Dower: Unbeaten junior middleweight contender Vanes Martirosyan (27-0, 17 KO’s) has a tough bout ahead of him on Saturday night against undefeated Joe Greene (22-0, 14 KO’s) on the undercard of the Miguel Cotto vs. Yuri Foreman bout at Yankee Stadium, in New York. This is one of those rare fights in which two young and promising fighters are matched against each other early in their careers.

A lot of things are expected of the 24-year-old Martirosyan, who is trained by Freddie Roach. Martirosyan’s career was humming along pretty nicely, beating all the B level junior middleweight fodder that was being steadily pumped into him until Martirosyan was matched against veteran Kassim Ouma last January. In a word, Martirosyan looked horrible. He did get the 10 round decision win over Ouma, but few fans that saw the fight believed that Martirosyan should have won the fight.

The outcome was less important than how badly Martirosyan had to struggle in that fight to get a win. This was an opponent that Martirosyan should have been able to beat without any problems if the he was the real deal, yet he went life and death with Ouma and won a controversial decision. It showed that Martirosyan is going to have to improve a lot if he’s to have any chance at beating one of the current junior middleweight champions in the future.

Martirosyan has faced better opposition in his short career compared to Green. Before the Ouma fight, Martirosyan defeated notable fighters Willie Lee, Andriy Tsurkan and Billy Lyell.

Greene, 24, has beaten fighters like Chris Gray, Jose Miguel Torres, Joshua Okine, Francisco Antonio Mora and Darryl Salmon. The 5’10 ½” Greene started his career as a middleweight, but after showing very little power and looking somewhat small for the division, he moved down in weight to the junior middleweight division where he’s better equipped to compete.

A southpaw, Greene is slick, fast and hard to hit cleanly. He’s a difficult fighter to beat because of his boxing style. He holds his right hand slow and likes to outbox his opponents. Greene does especially well against sluggers. Green could present big problems for Martirosyan, who likes to sit down on his punches to try and score knockouts.

Greene doesn’t seem to care whether he knocks out his opponents or not. He seems content in making them miss and countering them with straight lefts and right hooks to the head and body. Martirosyan is going to have to stay composed and try to focus more on boxing if he wants to beat Greene, because he’ll make Martirosyan look bad if he goes out looking for a knockout on Saturday night.

Ouma already exposed Martirosyan’s lack of defense in his last fight and Greene, an even better counter puncher than Ouma, could make things very difficult for Martirosyan if he tries to open up his offense full throttle. I see this fight as being a tactical one where both fighters peck away at each other for 10 rounds. I doubt either will want to open up with power shots and risk getting clobbered.