By Scott Gilfoid: Former 2008 Olympic gold medalist James DeGale (14-1, 9 KO’s) will still be defending his EBU super middleweight title on January 26th against Mouhamed Ali Ndiaye (22-1, 13 KO’s) at the Glow, Bluewater, Greenhithe, Kent, UK.
DeGale, 26, was supposed to be vacating the European Boxing Union 168 pound title to focus more on defending the WBC Silver super middleweight title that he picked up in his last fight against Fulgencio Zuniga two weeks ago, but DeGale seems to have have had a change of heart for some reason and will be keeping the strap at least for the time being.
It’s too bad because DeGale is wasting his time defending the belt against the type of competition that they’re ranking. It’s a real negative because DeGale has to defend the title all the time against guys that do nothing for his career, because they’re not the same kinds of guys that DeGale needs to be facing.
DeGale should be fighting guys like Edwin Rodriguez, Don George, Sakio Bika, Andre Dirrell, Anthony Dirrell, Robert Stieglitz, and Kelly Pavlik, but instead we’re seeing DeGale fight no names like Cristian Sanavia, Hadillah Mohoumadi and now Ndiaye.
It may be that this is as good as it gets for DeGale, that he never will win a world title, and will merely get a shot and will be slapped down by one of the champions. In that case then it’s good that DeGale is the EBU and WBC Silver strap holder, because if he can’t make it beyond this stage then there’s no point in him giving up these titles. This may be as far as DeGale goes in the sport.
DeGale is young, and can probably wait out fighters like Carl Froch, Mikkel Kessler and Arthur Abraham until they retire, and he then can slide in and try to capture their vacant belts, but I think that may be the only way DeGale can win a world title unless he improves 100% from the way he’s been looking.
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