By Scott Gilfoid: For some reason there’s a failure to launch with WBO light heavyweight champion Nathan Cleverly (24-0, 11 KO’s). I can’t even try to explain his matchmaking since he was given the title by the WBO, because it just looks like he’s milking his WBO title instead of looking for the best possible opponents and or at least facing his mandatory challenger like most champions are supposed to do. Cleverly won’t be facing his mandatory next, and instead it’ll be someone named Robin Krasniqi (37-2, 13 KO’s) on April 28th in London.

Krasniqi is ranked #4 by the World Boxing Organization, but you expect that ranking to go way, way down after he loses to Cleverly on April 28th at the Royal Albert Hall. Krasniqi will be lucky if he’s in the top 15 after he loses. I mean, none of the other sanctioning bodies have him ranked in the top 15, but the WBO does.

I’m not precisely sure what they see in him, because he just looks very average to me but in a negative way not a positive average. Cleverly will be facing him instead of Cleverly’s mandatory Dmitry Sukhotsky, who I hope for his sake he gets used to being passed over for his title challenge because I don’t think he’s going to be getting that fight in 2012.

I suppose the WBO will finally have to force Cleverly to fight Sukhotsky in 2013, because it’ll have turned into a sad joke by then if Cleverly is still being allowed to bypass his mandatory. It’s weird though. The WBO said no to the Krasniqi fight at first, but then they changed their mind after Cleverly’s promoter spoke with them.

The word was that Cleverly would have to fight Sukhotsky after the Krasniqi mismatch, but now Cleverly is talking about wanting to fight 47-year-old Bernard Hopkins in the summer. He’s not even mentioning Sukhotsky, as if the WBO will automatically cave in to allow Cleverly to face the likely beaten Hopkins in the summer and skip over Sukhotsky again.

Krasniqi doesn’t stand a chance in this fight against Cleverly. I saw a couple of Krasniqi’s fights on Youtube and he reminds me of a weaker version of Tommy Karpency. Actually, Krasniqi makes Karpency look good in comparison. I don’t know why the WBO decided to rank Krasniqi so high, because he looks plain awful to me, but it sure is helping Cleverly out. But what am I talking about? If Krasniqi wasn’t there, they’d still likely pick out someone just as weak as him to fight next instead of Sukhotsky.