By Dan Ambrose: With Darren Barker deciding to take on an arguably much better fighter in Sergio Martinez, WBC middleweight champion Julio Cesar Chavez Jr’s options have narrowed to that of Peter Manfredo Jr. (37-6, 20 Ko’s) for a bout that will be taking place on September 24th. The Alamodome in San Antonio, Texas is the venue that the fight will reportedly be taking place at. Besides Manfredo, Chavez Jr. could also end up facing either Giovanni Lorenzo or Nobuhiro Ishida.

Neither of the guys are particularly dangerous and Chavez Jr. should be able to win unless he gets blitzed early by one of them. You can’t say for sure whether Chavez Jr. can beat anyone because he’s incredibly flawed in terms of defensive skills and lacks big time power in his shots. Manfredo Jr. is the better known of the group, but also might be a bit more dangerous than Ishida or Lorenzo because he can bring it. However, if Chavez Jr. can’t beat these three fighters than he’s going to have problems with career, because it gets a lot better than this in terms of contenders and champions.

Chavez Jr. recently picked up the World Boxing Council belt by beating WBC paper middleweight champion Sebastian Zbik by a 12 round majority decision on June 4th. To be sure, Chavez Jr. won the fight, but he looked poor and his win was over a champion who had the title given to him by the WBC rather than having to fight for it after they stripped the previous champion Martinez of the title for not defending the belt against Zbik. It would have been pretty much an impossibility for Chavez Jr. or Zbik to beat Martinez. But the WBC made it easy by stripping Martinez, giving the title to Zbik and then Chavez Jr. coming along and beating the paper champion Zbik. Now Chavez Jr. is the new paper champion and he’s not eager to face Martinez or top contender Marco Antonio Rubio.