By Scott Gilfoid: Despite having said that he was interested in taking on the winner of the Chad Dawson vs. Bernard Hopkins fight, WBO light heavyweight champion Nathan Cleverly doesn’t appear all that eager to fight the winner 29-year-old Dawson now that he’s come out on top.

Cleverly told the BBC Sport “I think that [Dawson] is a fight that will happen in the future, but for the meantime we’ll probably be looking at the WBA champion Beibut Shumenov.”

Cleverly remains very eager to take on 47-year-old Hopkins in spite of the fact that he just came out the loser against Dawson, saying to the BBC “If he’s [Hopkins] still keen to fight on and continue fighting for a world title, then I’m sure the fight can still be made.”

There it is. Cleverly looking to fight the loser of the Hopkins-Dawson fight instead of the winner. What is up with that? I don’t understand that move for second. Is this a UK thing where you fight the loser rather than the winner? If that’s how Cleverly goes about choosing his opponents than I’m really disappointed in him.

I gave Cleverly a free pass when he dug deep in the rankings to take near bottom ranked WBO contender Tony Bellew, and I hardly said a word when Cleverly then ignored his mandatory again and little known #10 WBO Tommy Karpency. I was even ready to give Cleverly another free pass when he again chose not to fight his mandatory challenger Dimitry Sukhotsky and instead was looking to fight an opponent with an arguably inflated record in #4 WBO Robin Krasnigi. But now to try and fight Hopkins coming off of a loss instead of Dawson; that’s just sad to me. That’s cherry picking, isn’t it? What’s wrong with Cleverly facing Dawson? Is he too good?