By Dan Ambrose: WBA/WBO lightweight champion Juan Manuel Marquez thinks it’s high time that unbeaten middleweight contender Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. (41-0-1, 30 KO’s) start facing better opposition, saying in an article by Ricardo Lois at Examiner.com, “He [Chavez Jr.] has the ability to be a world champion, but, it is time they put him in with a name fighter and a fighter who will show us what he is made of.”

It’s difficult to imagine the great Marquez being brought along as slowly as Chavez has been in since he turned pro in 2003. Marquez

It looks like Chavez’s promoters aren’t willing to take that risk of matching Chavez Jr. just yet, as he’s being put in with a welterweight Alfonso Gomez in his next fight on December 4th at The Pond, in Anaheim, California. Gomez is a bad fighter, but he is at least two divisions below Chavez in weight and isn’t a huge puncher. It seems as if Top Rank doesn’t want to match Chavez tough for some reason at this point in his career.

He’s probably not improving a lot by being matched against B level fighters time and time again, but at this point it would probably be fatal for Chavez if they suddenly matched him against a good middleweight contender. Chavez could possibly be put in with WBA junior middleweight champion Miguel Cotto next year. That will probably be a nice blowout loss for Chavez Jr. unless I miss my guess. He’s now being trained by Freddie Roach, who seems to think very highly of him.

Of course, Roach generally thinks very highly of all his fighters and it’s hard to get an accurate gauge of how good Chavez Jr. is. In looking at his recent win over fringe middleweight contender John Duddy, Chavez looked like a good bottom 15 ranked fighter. However, the WBC has Chavez Jr. ranked number #1 over guys like Paul Williams, Matthew Macklin and David Lemieux. You have to wonder about what the WBC was thinking when they decided to rank Chavez at that position without him having any substantial wins in his seven year pro career, other than the victory over Duddy.

At 24, it’s hard to figure out what Top Rank is waiting for before they finally match Chavez Jr. against a good fighter. Putting him in with a smaller fighter like welterweight Gomez will only put off what will likely be a serious beating once Chavez finally is put in with a good middleweight.

If they want him to fight at junior middleweight, which I doubt he will be able to do much longer because of his struggles to stay under 160, they’re going to have to continue to match him carefully to keep him from getting exposed. The junior middleweight division has too many quality fighters like Alfredo Angulo, James Kirkland, Erislandy Lara, Paul Williams and Sergeii Dzinziruk.