By Scott Gilfoid: Unbeaten British welterweight contender Kell Brook (30-0, 20 KO’s) thinks a win over former WBA 147 lb. champion Vyacheslav Senchenko (34-1, 23 KO’s) on October 26th will prove to fans that he’s an elite fighter.
Senchenko is the tough opponent that Brook’s promoter Eddie Hearn had been talking about for ages that he wanted to match Brook against. Before the fight was announced, I had envisioned Brook facing someone that actually had an excellent chance of totally dominating him in a one-sided fashion like Keith Thurman, but I guess I should have known better.
Brook said to Sky Sports “He’s [Senchenko] come over here and he’s got a point to prove like he had last time with Ricky Hatton. I now want to get revenge for the fans also myself. I want to go out there and show why I’m talked about at the elite level.”
I don’t know that Brook,#1 IBF, #9 WBO, #15 WBC, is talked about a lot at the elite level. Actually, I rarely hear about Brook at all, so I’m not sure what he’s talking about. Why does Brook need to get revenge for what Senchenko did to Hatton. Heck, it could have been anyone that would have beaten Hatton in that fight last year in November. Hatton was practically begging to get beaten by not taking any tune-ups before the fight with Senchenko. The sad thing about Senchenko is, he was losing the fight to a rusty Hatton at the time that he stopped him with a body shot in the 9th round. What does that tell you about Senchenko that a ring rusty Hatton was able to come back from 3 1/2 years of inactivity and still control the fight against Senchenko for the first 8 rounds.
Senchenko is ranked #7 WBA, #8 IBF in the welterweight division, and based on his world rankings, he’s technically a world level fighter. But I’m not so certain that this victory will give Brook the kind of cache that thinks it will. Senchenko was considered a paper champion by a lot of fans in the three years that he held the WBA strap from 2009-2012, and he was whipped by the first slightly decent welterweight that he fought in Paulie Malignaggi. We’re not talking about Floyd Mayweather Jr. here. I don’t Malignaggi anywhere close to the level of Mayweather, yet he beat Senchenko like an old rug for 9 rounds before the fight was stopped in the 9th.
I see Senchenko as just another soft opponent picked out for Brook to make him look better than he actually is. I mean, Brook has 9 years of easy fights, and yet he’s still not stepping it up a couple levels to fight the top guys. I don’t consider Senchenko a world level fighter. He may be ranked in the top 15, but I don’t rate him as a top 15 welterweight. His loss to Malignaggi and his poor performance against Hatton showed me that Senchenko isn’t what I consider a world level fighter. I see Senchenko more as a Euro level welterweight rather than level guy.
Brook’s toughest opponent thus far is Carson Jones, and that guy is so far behind the other top welterweights that it’s not even funny. It’s pretty sad that Brook is still fighting the likes of Senchenko and Jones after 9 years as a pro. It’s some kind of failure to launch with his career for some reason.
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