By Dan Ambrose: Had Juan Manuel Marquez (50-5-1, 37 KO’s) and Juan Diaz (35-3, 17 KO’s) fought an immediate rematch last year shortly after their fight in February 2009, this would be a much more appealing bout.

After Marquez and Diaz fought, there was a lot of talk about how exciting their fight was for at least two weeks.

However, both of them have now been beaten since that time with both fighters completely dominated by different opponents in 2009. Diaz, 26, fought Paulie Malignaggi twice after the Marquez bout, and won one of the fights and then lost the second about in December 2009.

The bottom line is Diaz looked ragged in both Malignaggi fights, appearing almost over-the-hill at times as he was out-boxed with ease by the light-hitting Malignaggi. For his part, Marquez signed on for a fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr. at 144, and looked like he didn’t belong in the ring with Mayweather in losing a lopsided 12 round decision to Mayweather in September 2009.

In both cases, Marquez and Diaz looked really bad, so bad that it’s hard to get excited about seeing them fight at this point. It’s interesting, but it’s not interesting enough to really look forward to their fight and especially interesting enough to want to pay to watch them fight, at least for me.

It’s nice that Golden Boy Promotions has, in their good heart, stacked the card with the following match-ups: Daniel Jacobs vs. Dmitri Pirog, Robert Guerrero vs. Joel Casamayor and Jorge Linares vs. Rocky Juarez. However, the card lacks a huge main event.

It would have been much better if Golden Boy had put Marquez in with WBO lightweight interim champion Michael Katsidis, who is coming off of an impressive 3rd round knockout win over Kevin Mitchell and really wants to fight Marquez. That seems like a much more interesting fight than watching Marquez fight a guy like Diaz who probably should have lost his last two fights instead of just one of them. Diaz has looked pretty average of late, and Marquez looked little better against Mayweather.

Of course, Floyd has a way of doing that to his opponents, but there’s no escaping the fact that Marquez did look bad against Mayweather. I think HBO’s timing for wanting the Diaz-Marquez II rematch is way off. They missed the perfect time for the fight to happen and by making it happen now; I think it’s not helping what is a great undercard.

With all the fighters that Golden Boy has in their stable, you would think they could have found a better main event for this fight rather than Diaz-Marquez, with both coming off of one-sided losses.

Maybe the casual boxing fan won’t have a memory of Diaz and Marquez’s recent defeats, but if they don’t, then they probably also don’t remember their last fight against either. In that case, what’s the point of having Diaz vs. Marquez as the main event?