By Jim Dower: Former middleweight contender David Lemieux (25-2, 24 KO’s) will be back in action on June 8th against Juadiel Zepeda (12-5-1, 9 KO’s) in an eight round scheduled bout at the Bell Centre in Montreal, Canada. Lemieux, 23, has seen his career suddenly nosedive with two consecutive losses against Marco Antonio Rubio and Joachim Alcine in his last two fights last year.

Lemieux’s biggest problems, besides his lack of size for the middleweight division, has been his poor stamina. He was giving Rubio a real pounding for five rounds last year in April but then ran out of gas in the 6th and was stopped in the 7th. Against Alcine, Lemieux also faded badly in the second half of the fight and lost what should have been a very winnable fight for him.

Besides stamina issues, Lemieux needs a lot of work on his defensive skills, as he’s too easy to hit. He’s not going to be able to go far unless he learns how to move his head and block punches. His all out style of fighting makes him vulnerable against fighters with any kind of power, as we saw in his loss to the heavy-handed but hardly powerful Rubio.

Lemieux ideally needs to move down a weight class to 154 where his limited reach won’t be such a problem for him. He’ll still need to fix his stamina and defensive problems for him to ever amount to anything, but at least he won’t have to deal with a size issue as much as he will be if he sticks it out at 160.