By Allan Fox: The ring rusty Jean Pascal (27-2-1, 16 KO’s) has decided to slip in what should be an easy tune-up fight against 39-year-old journeyman George Blades (23-4, 16 KO’s) in a scheduled 10 round bout on the undercard of the Adonis Stevenson vs. Tavoris Cloud card on September 28th at the Bell Centre, in Montreal, Canada.
The Stevenson-Cloud, as good as it is, needed a decent co-feature bout to help attract interest from the Canadian boxing fans. While the Pascal-Blades fight is far from being a decent fight, Pascal’s name alone should be more than enough to attract a ton of Canadian fans to this event.
Pascal is already scheduled to face Lucian Bute on January 18th at the Bell Centre, but Pascal wanted to get a fight in before then to stay busy. Bute and Pascal were already supposed to have fought each other on May 25th, but Bute suffered a hand injury causing the fight to be postponed. Pascal has only fought once in the past 2 years, so it was important for him to get in another fight to keep the ring rust off.
Talking about rust, Blades has fought only 4 times in the past 6 years, and he’s lost 2 out of his last 4 fights. He did fight for a world title against WBO light heavyweight champion Zsolt Erdei in June 2007, and he was stopped in the 11th round of a one-sided fight.
Besides the mismatch between Pascal and Blades, the card will also have Canadian middleweight David Lemieux (29-2, 28 KO’s) facing journeyman Marcus Upshaw (15-10-2, 7 KO’s) in a scheduled 8 round fight. It’s unclear whether Lemieux’s promoter is trying to build him up for a future world title shot or if this how he’s going to be matched for the remainder of his career.
Lemieux has stepped up twice in his career against decent opposition against Marco Antonio Rubio and Joachim Alicine, and been beaten both times. Since then it’s been one easy fight after another for Lemieux with him knocking out four of his last opponents in 2 rounds or less.
There doesn’t seem to be any real improvement in his opposition, so it leaves one to guess whether his management will build him as an attraction as slaughterer of grade C opposition.
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