By Chris Williams: I still not too happy about having to shell out $44.95 to watch this Saturday’s mismatches between Juan Manuel Marquez against Sergiy Fedchenko, and Brandon Rios vs. Richard Abril in HBO’s pay-per-view split site telecast. It doesn’t see right to have to pay nearly $50 to see two fights that are pretty much little more than mismatches between mostly non-PPV caliber fighters.

At any rate, Marquez is going to put a real beating on the Ukrainian Fedchenko in their fight in Mexico city. Fedchenko has decent hand speed and power. He’ll be there to hit, but it won’t be as easy it would be for a normal fighter because of Fedchenko’s style of fighting, which includes a great deal of backing up.

Abril doesn’t have power and is more of a technician than anything else. Rios will be putting a lot of pressure on him all fight long, and I suspect that will start to pay off for Rios by the later rounds when he could get a knockout. He’s going to get hit a lot in this fight, but it’s no big deal because of Abril’s nonexistent power. Abril can bang a little bit, as we saw in his win over Miguel Acosta, but that was a rare occasion where he was hurting a quality fighter. Most of the time, Abril’s light shots have no effect on his opponents.

Promoter Bob Arum’s grand plan is to put the winners of these two fights in together in the summer. That’s what he wants, but I think Marquez wants something entirely different. He wants Manny Pacquiao, and doesn’t want to have to be put in with Rios just to get that fight. For his part, Rios desires the Marquez fight badly because it’s a fight he needs to make a name for himself, not that he’ll win it. Marquez would be crazy to take the Rios fight if he’s going to have to take that fight to get the Pacquiao rematch. That’s ridiculous.

Fedchenko had problems against Kaizer Mabuza. If you look at that fight you’ll see that Fedchenko tried to slug with Mabuza but ended up getting staggered in the 1st and punched around in almost every round of the bout. Mabuza was the stronger fighter and was able to put constant pressure on Fedchenko to leave him with little room in which to try and escape the punishment. Fedchenko found himself fighting a bad stye for him and it cost him the fight.