By Isobel Castillion: Multi weight World Champion Eric Morales (El Terrible) with fifty seven fights behind him is facing the knock out artist Marcos Rene Maidana (Chino) on the 9th April in Las Vegas Nevada for the interim WBA World light welterweight title.

Morales is most famed for his thrilling trilogies with Marco Antonio Barrera and Manny Pacquiao, and has knocked out Willie Limmond since his come back from temporary retirement and won all three of his fights.

He will be hoping to beat the younger up and coming Maidana, a bit like Barrera was hoping when he naively took a fight with Amir Khan. Barrera was naive in thinking he would be protected by the rules of boxing during that fight.

Maidana (Chino) will no doubt be hoping to beat Morales in better style than a head butt.

Maidana has become the highly likeable knock out artist who won over thousands of fans with his thrilling destruction of Victor Ortiz.

Maidana wasn’t that well known before his fight with Ortiz, beyond his home country of Argentina where he was already hugely popular. During the fight Chino was knocked down in the first round and as Ortiz came out to finish him off a right hand bomb came out of no where and dropped Ortiz like a lead balloon. Chino trembled slightly in anticipation of Ortiz’s response but of course there wasn’t one and as Maidana skipped around the lead weight which was now Ortiz, we knew this man was something special.

But it wasn’t until Chino was dropped twice more in the ferocious fight that he really proved to be something else. There was a look of horror on VOrtiz’s face as Chino got up from a third knock down as though he had risen from the dead. And as Maidana recovered in his corner and the bell rang, instead of looking broken and vulnerable he had a look about him as though his Gran had been mugged and he’d just seen Ortiz doing it, he spat and went back out there with the arena chanting Ortiz’s name and inspired us all with his courage.

During round five Chino managed to break Ortiz down and cut him badly. The bell rang for round six and Victor naively went to tap gloves but Chino soon reminded him what kind of fight he was in and leapt forward ferociously to finish what he had started. Chino went out and destroyed Ortiz’s spirit before he even destroyed him physically. A battered and broken Ortiz famously quit the fight standing up.
And so Marcos Maidana the knock out artist who refuses to lose was born.

A rematch between these two and maybe even a trilogy would be great and is a strong possibility for the future.

Maidana was hailed ‘the warrior’ by Timothy Bradley after his fight with Khan, where instead of Khan gaining credit for knocking Chino down in the first round, Chino got all the credit for getting up from the crippling body shot. And now, the two warriors, Maidana and Morales will go to war, one young, one experienced, in what should be a great night for boxing. This is Maidana’s big chance to beat a living legend and get back into the running for some great fights.