By Allan Fox: 35-year-old Erik Morales (52-7, 36 KO’s) has decided not to it easy in his first defense of his WBC light welterweight crown by taking on #4 WBC contender Danny Garcia (22-0, 14 KO’s) on March 24th at the Reliant Arena, in Houston, Texas, United States.

This is one of the tougher contenders that the WBC has ranked in the top 10, and you have to give Morales a lot of credit for being willing to take the fight. However, he may have wished he hadn’t by the end of the fight because the 5’9″ 23-year-old Garcia will likely have too much speed, size, power and youth for Morales to cope with. This is the problem that Morales has in this fight.

He’s not a natural light welterweight, but rather someone that has become too old and heavy to make his old weight classes of super bantamweight, featherweight and super featherweight. Those were the perfect weight classes for Morales, because his power and size was better suited for that weight. At light welterweight, Morales isn’t as dominating and doesn’t huge power compared to a lot of the bigger punchers. The wins don’t come easy, as we saw with Morales’ recent life and death struggle with 22-year-old fringe contender Pablo Cesar Cano last September in winning the World Boxing Council title.

When you have a fighter like Morales struggling to beat a guy the likes of Cano, it suggests that Morales won’t be long as a champion for the WBC and will be mighty lucky if he can make it even through this fight on March 24th against Garcia. I have no doubts that Morales will be in tip top shape for the fight, but it will take more than that for him to defeat a younger fighter in the class of Garcia. What Morales needs most of all to win this fight is youth, and he’s not getting that back. It’s gone and he’ll have to settle for just being the more experienced fighter of the two.