By Eric Thomas: WBA Super World middleweight champion Felix Sturm (35-2-1, 15 KO’s) defends his World Boxing Association for the 10th time on July 2nd against middleweight contender Matthew Macklin (28-2, 19 KO’s) at the Lanxess-Arena, Cologne, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany. Compared to some of the 32-year-old Sturm’s opponents that he’s picked out for his title defenses, Macklin looks like a champion.

Sturm has held the WBA title for the past four years, yet hasn’t had one fight that you could even consider being close to a career defining fight. The problem is besides not going out of his way to take on the top fighters like Kelly Pavlik and Sergio Martinez, Sturm has made a habit of choosing the lower ranked fighters when making non-mandatory title defenses of his WBA belt. Macklin, ranked #3 WBA, #7 WBO and #8 IBF, is one of the better fighters that Sturm has faced.

However, I personally rank Macklin far below fighters like Gennady Golovkin, Dimitriy Pirog, Pavlik, Paul Williams, Sergio Martinez, and Hassan N’Dam N’Jikam in ability. To me this is more of the same for Sturm. In his last fight, Sturm defeated Ronald Hearns by a 7th round stoppage in February. Sturm took a lot of punishment in that fight and showed his age. It was an unusual choice to pick Hearns because he’d done very little during his career other than facing B level fighters and was ranked low by the WBA. Sturm still chose to fight him rather than the dangerous Golovkin. Before that, Sturm fought fringe contender Giovanni Lorenzo and beat him by a lopsided 12 round decision in September 2010.

In an article at supersport.com, Sturm said “This will be one of my toughest fights, because I know I can win against Macklin only when I am in top form.”

I expect Sturm to beat Macklin without too many problems and then likely turn around and fight the #15 ranked contender Jorge Sebastian Heiland next or one of the other lower ranked fighters in another optional title defense.