By Jim Dower: This Saturday night WBA light heavyweight champion Beibut Shumenov (10-1, 6 KO’s) will be taking on World Boxing Organization (WBO) light heavyweight champion Jurgen Braehmer (36-2, 29 KO’s) in a unification bout at the Ice Mansion, in Schymkent, Kazakhstan. The winner of the fight will facing unbeaten Nathan Cleverly at some point in the future.

Shumenov and Braehmer both like to slug it out, and both of them have questionable stamina. Braehmer, 32, is getting up there in age and has been fighting as a pro since 1999. Although he’s held the WBO title since 2009, his opposition has been rather poor. It would be fair to say that Braehmer is what you would call a paper champion, but the same applies for Shumenov. This is what makes this fight so good. Both of these guys are badly flawed and not really the main guys in the light heavyweight division, but they’ll make for an entertaining fight.

Shumenov, a 2004 Olympian for Kazakhstan, has already been beaten once in his career by Gabriel Campillo in August 2009. Shumenov avenged the defeat last year by beating Campillo by a 12 round split decision. I saw the fight and had Campillo winning it easily by the scores of 117-111. Shumenov just didn’t throw enough punches again and got badly outworked by Campillo.

The knock on Shumenov is that he fights really tight, lacks flexibility, suffers from a low punch output much of the time and is kind of slow of foot. He’s also not that big of a puncher. Shumenov is able to fight hard for four or five rounds but then starts to look really tired and loses the little effectiveness that he has going for him. In his last fight, he easily defeated knockout puncher Viacheslav Uzelkov by a 12 round decision in July 2010.

It was an easy fight for Shumenov because Uzelkov quickly ran out of gas early in the fight when Shumenov failed to down. Uzelkov was used to knockout out overmatched opponents early in his fights and when Shumenov didn’t go down, Uzelkov ran out of gas.