By Gareth Rees: Following Nonito Donaire’s (30-1) dominant 9th round TKO victory over Toshiaki Nishioka (39-4-3) on Saturday night, RingTV.com did a survey asking fans who they want Donaire to face next. Somewhat surprisingly the Mares-Moreno winner came out on top with more than 37% of the vote with undefeated Guillermo Rigondeaux second in the voting with 32% of votes.

Either of those fights would be exciting for fans and would really decide who is the top dog in the Super Bantamweight division as well as having pound-for-pound implications. Fans would be hoping that any of these future fights will not be a let-down like Saturday night’s fight, as the highly rated Nishioka was very disappointing being overly defensive for the majority of the fight.

Despite what some people have said Nishioka was a very legitimate opponent for Donaire as he was ranked number 1 in the division by the majority of sites and magazines, which made his poor performance all the more disappointing. Although you could quite rightly argue Nishioka was too old and hadn’t fought in over a year, so we couldn’t see how much Donaire has improved; what many have not realised from Nishioka’s performance is, not just the respect but fear some of the contenders have of Donaire’s power and skill especially with his counter punching ability. This is the reason he is on many people’s top 10 pound-for-pound list.

There is however one major problem with matching Donaire with the Mares-Moreno winner and that is, Donaire is with Top Rank and both Mares and Moreno are with Golden Boy. We all know how well those two rival promoters get on, so no matter how much the fans want the fight recent history shows it would be unlikely for Top Rank and Golden Boy to do a joint promotion. This then leads us back to Rigondeaux but if you believe what Donaire said on Saturday night, Rigondeaux doesn’t have the resume to entice Donaire into a fight. So although the survey which apparently had more than 6,000 votes shows what the fans want, in reality it leaves more questions than answers over Donaire’s next opponent.