By Michael Lieberman: If HBO is willing to purchase this fight, we could be seeing an in house fight between two Lou Dibella fighters in July between WBC middleweight Emeritus champion Sergio Martinez (47-2-2, 26 KO’s) and Peter Manfredo Jr. (37-6, 20 KO’s), a former contestant from the reality television series “The Contender.” It’s kind of hard to see HBO saying yes to this mismatch because they wanted no part in seeing what would have likely been a better match-up between Sebastian Zbik and Martinez recently and opted for the Sergiy Dzinziruk vs. Martinez fight instead.

The Dinzinziruk-Martinez fight turned out to be a one-sided fight and it’s hard to see the Zbik vs. Martinez fight being worse. However, Manfredo vs. Martinez, at least on paper, seems like a really poor fight because Manfredo hasn’t done much in the past six years other than beating B level fighters one after another. Manfredo is an guy that’s been shown a lot on ESPN and is well known by hardcore boxing fans.

However, Manfredo has failed when he’s stepped it up against Sakio Bika, Jeff Lacy, Joe Calzaghe and Sergio Mora. That’s not exactly the kind of credentials that you’re looking for if you want to see a good match-up on HBO for someone to be taking on the most exciting fighter in the middleweight division. Martinez has the hot hand right now and by putting him in with Manfredo, it might be like putting him under a bunch of cold water and dampening the progress he’s made in exciting fights against Paul Williams, Kelly Pavlik and his overpowering performance against Dzinziruk last weekend.