By Scott Gilfoid: WBO light heavyweight champion Nathan Cleverly (24-0, 11 KO’s) will be reportedly finding out this Thursday who will be facing him on November 10th at the Staples Center, in Los Angeles, California, USA. Cleverly, 25, was supposed to fight little known American Ryan Coyne, but that fight won’t be happening due to a legal dispute from his previous promoter Don King. As such, Cleverly’s next opponent will be picked from a small list of fighters according to Sky Sports.

Cleverly said to Sky Sports “I really don’t care who’s in the other corner, as long as I get to fight…If it’s a non-title fight then it won’t be the end of the world.”

I think Cleverly should start caring about who he fights, because his career won’t mean much if his legacy is built on fighting the likes of Tommy Karpency and Robin Krasniqi. The guy needs to care.

It hardly matters because the Coyne fight wasn’t going to be a big deal either because casual boxing fans don’t have a clue who this guy is, and few of them know who Cleverly. You could probably walk the streets of New York all day asking one person after another if they’ve ever heard of Nathan Cleverly and I’d bet that you’d end up with the amount of people being in the single digits.

Cleverly is TOTALLY unknown in the U.S, so it doesn’t matter that his fight with Coyne went down the drain. The only thing with that is if the replacement is too god awful then the World Boxing Organization will likely not let their WBO strap be on the line for the fight.

Cleverly won’t lose the belt, but he won’t have it on the line. The fight would also be 10 rounds instead of 12. Again, doesn’t really matter because 12 or 10, its all the same when people don’t know who he is. They could make it 3 and it would amount to the same. The only way a Cleverly fight would mean anything is if he were matched against a WELL KNOWN American like Bernard Hopkins, Antonio Tarver or Chad Dawson.

That’s not going to happen because Cleverly doesn’t have the name for those guys to want to fight him. So Cleverly is kind of in a bind. He hasn’t faced the names to get well known, and because he hasn’t faced the names, no one wants to fight him. He could probably get someone like Beibut Shumenov to fight him, but he’s not well known among casual boxing fans in the U.S as of yet, so there’s not much gain there. Besides, Shumenov would probably beat Cleverly quite badly, and I guess that’s not what Cleverly’s promoter wants.