Kell Brook looks too small for the welterweight division

By Boxing News - 09/21/2010 - Comments

Image: Kell Brook looks too small for the welterweight divisionBy Scott Gilfoid: I can’t say I was impressed with Kell Brooks (22-0, 15 KO’s) 5th round stoppage over Michael Jennings (36-3, 17 KO’s) last Saturday night in the Magnificent Seven card in Birmingham. Although Brook got the win on a cut stoppage in the 5th, he wasn’t impressing me in the least. Brook looks shorter than the 5’9″ height that he has listed. I see him as around 5’7″, just a tad bit taller than WBO light welterweight champion Timothy Bradley. The sad thing is that Brook’s fight with Jennings was for the WBO welterweight title eliminator bout.

That’s not going to be doing Brook any favors because he’s not in the same class as WBO welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao, and it would be a complete slaughter if Pacquiao was interested in fighting Brook. He won’t fight him, though. I expect Pacquiao to vacate his WBO title within the year, leaving it vacant for Brook and knockout artist Mike Jones (22-0, 18 KO’s) to fight for the title. Man, a fight between the six-foot power punching Jones and and the little Brook wouldn’t even be a fair fight, as far as I can tell. Jones is just too big and too power, and Brook wasn’t even able to trouble Jennings with his punches.

This is the same Jennings that 5’7″ Miguel Cotto blew away in five rounds with power punches to the head and body. The contrast between Cotto’s fight and Brook’s fights with Jennings is startling to say the least. Brook looks much weaker compared to Cotto, yet around the same exact height. That’s not a good thing for Brook to be short and weak, because Jones isn’t. He’s going to take Brook’s head off when they get around to fighting for the vacant WBO welterweight title.

My advice for Brook is to move down in weight to the light welterweight division as soon as humanly possible before Jones ends up knocking Brook out. If he’s smart, Brook might want to skip the light welterweight division altogether and move down to lightweight, because I don’t see Brook being able to compete against the best light welterweights in the division like Devon Alexander, Zab Judah, Timothy Bradley, Victor Ortiz and Marcos Maidana. That division is too strong right now for the light hitting Brook to compete in. He’d have a much better chance of being a factor at lightweight. But at welterweight, forget it. Brook is too small and too weak to beat the best fighters.



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