By Jim Dower: Former WBA/WBC super middleweight champion Mikkel Kessler (44-2, 33 KO’s) has pulled out of his scheduled April 14th fight against WBO super middleweight champion Robert Stieglitz due to a lingering right hand injury. Kessler will now fight on May 19th against a still to be determined opponent at the Parken, Copenhagen, Denmark.

According to Danish news, the 33-year-old Kessler could be moving up in weight to challenge IBF light heavyweight champion (24-0, 19 KO’s) in his next fight. That’s one plan that Kessler’s promoter is working on and it makes a lot of sense. If he’s going to miss out on the Stieglitz bout, which easily would have been Kessler’s best opportunity to capture a title at 168, he’d be better off moving up in weight and picking off the very vulnerable 30-year-old Cloud.

At that weight class, Kessler could hold onto the title a lot longer than he will at super middleweight due to very limited opposition. Cloud has held onto the International Boxing Federation for the past two years since beating Clinton Woods to capture the belt in August 2009. If Kessler can win that fight, he could hold onto that strap for another two to four years because of the awful opposition. At 168, Kessler would be lucky if he could make it through a year as the champion.

Kessler has had a number of injuries that has wiped out fights for him in the past couple of years. He had to pull out of the Super Six tournament due to an eye injury before his scheduled fight against Allan Green. Then last November, Kessler injured his right hand while training for the Stieglitz fight and had to postpone the fight until April 14th. Now the injury has wiped out yet another Stieglitz fight causing Stieglitz to move on to a possible fight against #3 WBO George Groves. Kessler has to look for something and the Cloud is one of the options. There’s also the possibility that Kessler could face WBA interim super middleweight champion Brian Magee or an easy fight or take on the regular WBA champion Karoly Balszay, which would be about as easy as the Mageee fight.