By William Mackay: 34-year-old Ryan Rhodes (45-4, 31 KO’s) has decent power for a junior middleweight. The problem for Rhodes is that he’s facing a guy in WBC junior middleweight champion Saul Alvarez (36-0-1, 26 KO’s) who has much more pop in his shots and is a much younger fighter than him. Rhodes doesn’t like to get hit and tends to shy away from fierce exchanges with his opponents.
In a fight against Alvarez, Rhodes would be expected to take a lot of mammoth shots in order to win a 12 round decision or to possibly stop Alvarez. It’s going to be tough for Rhodes because he has to be willing to stand in front of Alvarez if he has any hopes of winning the fight, and the unfortunate problem is that Rhodes probably doesn’t have the style or the chin to be able to take the kinds of shots that Alvarez will be dishing out for 12 long rounds.
This is really a soft opponent for Alvarez. That’s just the way it is. I’m not sure why precisely that the WBC has Rhodes ranked at number #3, because Rhodes hasn’t beaten anyone good enough to suggest that he belongs there. I’m more inclined to go with fightnews.com’s rankings for the junior middleweight division, who don’t have Rhodes ranked in the top 16. Wins over guys like Luca Messi and Rocky Junior aren’t enough to put you in the class of Alvarez. I think this fight has Alvarez vs. Matthew Hatton written all over it. I’m not even sure that Rhodes will be as competitive as Hatton was.
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