By Dan Ambrose: Number #1 ranked WBC middleweight contender Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. 41-0-1, 30 KO’s) fights the much smaller 2nd tier junior middleweight Billy Lyell (22-8, 4 KO’s) on January 29th in a 10 round bout in Coluacan, Sinaloa, Mexico. Chavez, 24, now trained by Freddie Roach, hopes to defeat the small 5’9″ Lyell and then take on the WBC middleweight interim champion Sebastian Zbik (30-0, 10 KO’s) after that.

It’s a much easier way of sliding into the WBC title than risking a fight against the WBC middleweight champion Sergio Martinez, who appears to be a couple levels above the young Chavez in talent. Chavez won’t become a star by backing his way into the title. He’s going to have actually fight the best guys and not look to fight beatable smaller guys or paper champions like Zbik. If the goal is to make Chavez a star, fighting Lyell and Zbik isn’t going to do the job at least in the United States.

Lyell isn’t even ranked in the top 15 in the junior middleweight division and this is another case of Chavez Jr. going after a much smaller fighter than him. He was previously on the verge of fighting welterweight Alfonzo Gomez recently last year until getting sick and having to cancel that fight. Pawel Wolak, a weak punching junior middleweight, was another fighter that Chavez was looking to fight.

Chavez Jr. should get by Lyell. If not, then Roach needs to re-think what he plans on doing with Chavez because he doesn’t seem to have the kind of talent that other fighters do in the middleweight division. Ignoring Chavez’s rediculous #1 ranking by the WBC, Chavez appears to be a bottom 20 fighter, behind flawed guys like Daniel Jacobs, Daniel Geale, Domenico Spada and Enrique Ornelas and of course behind the better middleweights like Martinez, Kelly Pavlik, Gennady Golovkin, Paul Williams, Felix Sturm, Dimitry Pirog, Sebastian Sylvester, Roman Karmazin and Hassan N’Dam N’Jikam.