By Scott Gilfoid: After toiling away in near obscurity for the past seven years the 29-year-old Darren Barker 23-0, 14 KO’s) has been picked out by the best fighter in the middleweight division, Sergio Martinez (47-2-2, 26 KO’s), to fight on October 1st. It’s going to be bad for Darren.

You don’t like to see guys that have been handled softly their entire career to be suddenly thrown in with the best fighter in the division. That’s why in the old days fighters were brought up slowly by matching them against increasingly better fighters. That doesn’t seem to have happened in this case, though.

Barker is going from facing guys like Domenico Spada and Afif Belghecham into fighting Martinez. The results will are pretty obvious. One can already forecast what’s going to happen in the Martinez-Barker fight just by looking at how inexperienced Barker is against world class fighters. He previous little experience and he’s going to blasted apart in this fight.

You can also look at some of Barker’s fights to see how limited he is. He looks slow, robotic, clumsy on his feet and entirely too stiff to beat a quality guy Martinez. I think Barker would drown if he thrown in with at least 15 other top middleweights and I’m doing that at the top of my head. If I really sit down and think about it, I don’t even know if Barker can beat the top 20 fighters in the division.

There’s some really decent fighters at this weight that would give Barker all he could handle and likely stop him, for example, Felix Sturm, Matthew Macklin, Gennady Golovskin, Daniel Geale, Marco Antonio Rubio, Roman Karmazin, David Lemieuz, Nobuhiro Ishida, Dimitriy Pirog, Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., Peter Quillin, Sebastian Zbik, Daniel Jacobs, Hassan N’Dam N’Jikam, Brian Vera, Andy Lee, Matt Korobov, Sebastian Sylvester, Kassim Ouma, Michael Oliveiera, and Fernando Guerrero.

I see all of them as better middleweights than Barker. I do think that the guy has been give an incredibly generous ranking of No.3 by the World Boxing Council. They didn’t do him any favors by ranking him so high because now he’s going to fight Martinez and get taken out.