By Scott Gilfoid: Former middleweight title challenger Darren Barker (23-1, 14 KO’s) wisely rejected a meaningless fight against middleweight contender Martin Murray (23-0-1, 10 KO’s) this week in order to get a much bigger fight against one of the middleweight champions.

Barker, 29, reportedly turned down a respectable offer to fight the British and Commonwealth middleweight champion Murray, which tells you how certain that Barker and his team must be that they can land a title shot. Barker could be facing either WBC middleweight champion Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., IBF champ Daniel Geale or WBO champion Dmitry Pirog next.

Those are obviously better options than fighting a guy that only has domestic level titles and who struggled to a 12 round draw with WBA middleweight champion Felix Sturm in his last fight last month. I thought Murray clearly lost that fight by at least two rounds. He didn’t deserve to a draw and couldn’t handle Sturm’s power when he opened up on him in the 12th round.

I think Murray’s promoter needs to try and find some fights for him in 2012 so he can try and work his way back to another title shot. He can forget about Sturm giving him another shot because he blew it. Murray is ranked #4 by the World Boxing Association and he’s going to have to get ranked higher than that to become Sturm’s mandatory challenger so he can get another shot.

My suggestion is for him to try and face someone like Andy Lee, and if he can win that fight then that should help out his ranking quite a bit. But he needs to forget about Barker because he’s got bigger fish to fry.

I see Murray as around No.16 in the middleweight division, below guys like Sturm, Sergio Martinez, Pirog, Gennady Golovkin, Marco Antonio Rubio, Geale, Osumanu Adama, Gzegorz Proksa, Julio Cesar Chavez Jr,, Barker, Matthew Macklin, Lee, Daniel Jacobs, Sebastian Zbik, and Hassan N’Dam N’Jikam.