By Allan Fox: Eddie Chambers (36-2, 18 KO’s) will be coming off a long 16-month layoff when he steps into the ring to face former two division world champion Tomasz Adamek (45-2, 28 KO’s) on June 16th for a 10 round fight at the Prudential center in Newark, New Jersey.

Both the venue and the number of rounds would appear to favor Adamek, as this will be a home fight for him and he won’t have to deal with any big stamina problems by having the fight only 10 rounds instead of 12.

Adamek told Fightnews.com “Eddie decided to fight me after his 16 month break from actually being in the ring…I like to fight against desperate opponents.”

I guess that’s why Adamek fought 42-year-old Andre Golota, 37-year-old Kevin McBride, 38-year-old Michael Grant, 36-year-old Vinny Maddalone, as well as soft fights against Nagy Aguilera and Bobby Gunn. If you get them when they’re desperate or when they’re career is on the downside, you can do well. However, I’d much prefer to see Adamek facing contenders rather than guys coming off of long 16 month breaks like Chambers; not that I see this as a bad fight for Adamek. Compared to his fights against the aforementioned fighters above, Chambers is a huge improvement. I just wish Adamek would face live threats that are fighting consistently and doing well in the ring, like Denis Boytsov, Kubrat Pulev, Robert Helenius, Alexander Dimitrenko, and some of the younger heavyweights like David Price and Tyson Fury.

Chambers last fought in February of last year in beating Derric Rossy by a 12 round unanimous decision. At the time, Chambers had been out of the ring for the previous months dating back to his 12th round knockout loss to IBF/WBO heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko in March 2010. Why the long time out of the ring for Chambers? It’s hard to say. He may have wanted extra time off to recover from his bad KO loss to Wladimir or he could have been unhappy with the opponents available to him. Whatever the case, Chambers missed out on a couple of fights between 2010 and 2011. He then missed out on at least another three fights in 2011 if he had stayed busy. Losing that many fights in two years obviously isn’t a good thing career-wise.

Chambers will be coming into his fight with Adamek with a lot of question marks about where he’ll be at physically in terms of sharpness.

Adamek won his last fight against Aguilera and looked good against a limited slugger. However, Adamek looked horrible in losing his fight before that against WBC heavyweight champion Vitali Klitschko last year in September. Adamek was too small and he fought the wrong fight against Vitali by spending too much time circling the ring instead of taking the fight to the 40-year-old Vitali.