(Nathan Cleverly seen here showing beautiful punching form on a rabbit punch) By Scott Gilfoid: It seems like all the soft match-making that’s been done for WBO light heavyweight champion Nathan Cleverly (26-0, 12 KO’s) has really gone to his head because he’s now thinking he can go to war with his next challenger Sergey Kovalev (21-0-1, 19 KO’s) next month in their fight on August 17th at the Motorpoint Arena, Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom.
Cleverly says he’s going to try and beat the knockout artist Kovalev in his own game by getting in the trenches with him and slugging it out.
Cleverly said to Fightnews, “Beat Kovalev and I become a huge star on both sides of the Atlantic…people will be surprised when I’m going toe-to-toe with him and knock him out.”
This is what I was afraid of. All the god awful opposition that Cleverly has fought during his 8-year pro career has got him thinking he can walk on water now. I had a feeling that Cleverly’s ego would get the better of him sooner or later due the poor opponents he’d been facing recently after having been given the WBO title outside of the ring rather inside of it.
I guess I’m not surprised that Cleverly thinks he’s going to spank the slugger Kovalev at his own game. I mean, look at the guys Cleverly has been matched up with in the last three years: Tommy Karpency, Shawn Hawk, Aleksy Kuziemski, Robin Krasniqi, Tony Bellew, Karo Murat, Nadjib Mohammedi, and Antonio Brancalion.
Where’s the quality? There’s no there there. It’s just a bunch of bland opponents and now Cleverly is crowing like he’s actually accomplished something instead of getting a clue a realizing how truly awful his opposition has been all these years.
For Cleverly, you really got to see his resume as being 0-0 right now, because you count all those mediocre to poor opponents as actual meaningful fights to get ready for Kovalev, because it’s as if those fights don’t even count, to me at least. It’s like a careers worth of tune-up fights leading up to the Kovalev bout. I know the light heavyweight division is weak and all, but man, Cleverly should have stepped ages ago instead of fighting the fodder he’s been matched up against.
Comments are closed.