By Dan Ambrose: Despite the fact that IBF welterweight champion Randall Bailey (43-7, 37 KO’s) is the newly crowned International Boxing Federation 147 pound champion after knocking #1 IBF Mike Jones out in the 11th round last month, Bailey will likely be making his first defense of his crown against #6 IBF Devon Alexander (23-0, 13 KO’s) on September 8th in Alexander’s home city of Saint Louis, at the Scott Trade Center in Missouri.

According to RingTV, Golden Boy Promotions CEO Richard Schaefer let them know that’s where the Alexander-Bailey fight is headed. Alexander draws huge crowds of 10,000 fans while fighting in Saint Louis, and Bailey obviously can’t compete with that. The bigger money is in Saint Louis rather than Miami, Florida where Bailey lives.

However, the negative aspect to the fight taking place in Saint Louis is that Alexander has won two highly controversial decisions over Andriy Kotelnik and Lucas Matthysse while fighting there, and some boxing fans feel that visiting fighters may need a knockout to ensure that they come out on top.

There’s no question that Alexander won his last fight while fighting in Saint Louis in beating Marcos Maidana by a lopsided 10 round unanimous decision. However, there is some controversy in that the referee never took points off from Alexander for an excessive amount of clinching he was doing in the fight.

I counted 10 clinches or more per round, and that may seem like a lot for an average who doesn’t understand those kinds of stats, it was a lot and it made the fight difficult to watch because of Alexander grabbing Maidana so often.

When you have a fighter clinching that often you’d like to see a referee give some warnings and start taking off points at some point in the fight. Unfortunately Alexander was able to clinch the entire fight and it took away from what might have been an impressive win had he not been draped all over Maidana all night.