By Dan Ambrose: Next month, former two-time light heavyweight champion Chad Dawson (29-0, 17 KO’s) will be facing World Boxing Council (WBC) light heavyweight champion Jean Pascal (25-1, 16 KO’s) on August 14th at the Bell Centre, in Montreal, Canada. The fight will be shown on HBO. Dawson, 28, isn’t so much into winning another title, but rather is looking to get a good payday.

In order to get this payday, Dawson will have given up nine months of his career. In hindsight, it might be worth it, because for Dawson to get this one payday against Pascal, he could have fought twice. It just goes to show how void the light heavyweight division is of top talent. Once Dawson gets by Pascal, he needs to seriously consider moving down in weight to the super middleweight division so that he doesn’t have to waste anymore of his career waiting on injured fighters like Pascal to heal up. Pascal injured his right shoulder in his last fight against Adrian Diaconu.

Pascal won the fight, but hardly looked impressive because of his injury. Less than a week later, Pascal had shoulder surgery to remove a bone chip from his right shoulder. Pascal, 27, has now had eight months to recover from the shoulder surgery and hopefully he’ll b ready to go next month against Dawson. Pascal will be fighting in front of a home crowd in Montreal.

However, there’s little chance that Pascal will win this fight, unless it ends up being a controversial decision along the lines of the one Lucian Bute won against Librado Andrade in Canada. Pascal has got good hand speed, but he hasn’t beaten or faced anyone like Dawson before.

Up until now, the best opponent that Pascal has faced thus far was Carl Froch, who beat Pascal by a 12 round unanimous decision in December 2008. Froch didn’t do anything special to get the win. All he did was pressure Pascal until he wore down after six rounds, and then punished him in the 2nd half of the fight.

Since the Froch loss, Pascal has got his career back in order, beating Diaconu twice, Pablo Daniel Zamora and Silvio Branco. However, none of those fighters are anywhere near the same class as Dawson. Pascal went life and death with Diaconu and is lucky to have both fights, but against Dawson, you can count on Pascal getting easily beaten.

This should be a one-sided fight all the way through it. Pascal is good, but he’s a couple notches below the talent level of Dawson. The only question for this fight is whether the judges in Montreal get the scoring correct. I expect this fight to be one-sided enough where they can’t possibly get the scoring wrong. Look for Dawson to drop Pascal a couple of times en route to winning by a 12 round shutout.