By Jim Dower: With the cancellation of his unification bout against World Boxing Organization (WBO) light heavyweight champion Jurgen Braehmer that was scheduled for Saturday, WBA light heavyweight champion Beibut Shumenov (10-1, 6 KO’s) has found a replacement in 40-year-old WBA middleweight champion William Joppy (39-6-2, 30 KO’s) to fight at the Ice Mansion, in Schymkent, Kazakhstan on Saturday. This is a pretty poor replacement, even if it is a last second one, because Joppy is totally faded and has lost two out of his last three fights. He’s not what he once was when he held the World Boxing Association middleweight title off an on between 1996 and 2002. Except for Bernard Hopkins, the middleweight division was weaker then and Joppy was able to capitalize on that by holding down one of the titles.

Shumenov was supposed to be fighting the 32-year-old Braehmer but he suddenly backed out of the fight this week after developing a bad case of diarrhea shortly after arriving to Kazakhstan. There’s hopes that Shumenov will still be able to fight Braehmer in the future but not soon enough for Saturday’s fight. Shumenov is a decent fighter, and has traded fights with Gabriel Campillo in the past year. I had Shumenov losing both fights, however. He’s slow, lacks flexibility and isn’t a huge puncher. He’s an average fighter in a poor division and that helps him. I don’t see Shumenov in the same class as the better fighters in the light heavyweight division like Chad Dawson, Jean Pascal, Nathan Cleverly, Tavoris Cloud, Glen Johnson, Zsolt Erdei, Campillo, Adrian Diacanu, Hugo Garay, and Bernard Hopkins.

Joppy has been beaten by Lucian Bute and Sebastian Demers in the past two years. In his last fight against little known Cory Cummings in November, Joppy was held to a 10 round majority draw. That’s not a good sign going into this fight, but then again Joppy isn’t being brought in with hopes that he can beat Shumenov. He’s being brought in as a name guy so that Shumenov can have a notable name on his record and can get the attention of boxing fans with a win over Joppy.