By Chris Williams: If Top Rank promoter Bob Arum gets his way, he’ll be matching up his fighter WBC/WBO bantamweight champion Nonito Donaire (26-1, 18 KO’s) against WBA Super World bantamweight champion Anselmo Moreno (30-1-1, 10 KO’s) in a unification match in May on HBO. This wouldn’t be a fight that boxing fans in the United States would get too excited about, though, because Moreno, 25, has never fought in the U.S. before and he has a distinctly unpleasant fighting style which consists of him running around the ring all night, slapping with his punches.
Moreno is a tall, skinny, high volume puncher with little power to speak of. Moreno struggled badly to beat recent Donaire victim Wladimir Sidorenko in May 2009, earning a 12 round split decision in a fight that could have gone either way. In contrast, Donaire defeated Sidorenko by a 4th round stoppage last December. Beating Moreno will do little to impress fans, other than giving Donaire another trinket to show off and for the HBO analysts to comment on.
It’s probably not worth the wasted time that would be needed to train for and take the fight with Moreno. Arum would be better off skipping this wasted fight and instead moving Donaire up in weight so that he can pick up one of the paper titles at super bantamweight against the awful opposition they have in that weight division. Super bantamweight, besides cruiserweight, has got to be the weakest division in boxing. There’s no there there.
The talent is slim to say the least. Arum would be smart to skip this division altogether and immediately move Donaire up in weight to featherweight while he’s still young. Donaire can always come back to the super bantamweight division later on and beat whoever the champions are without any problems.
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