Terence Crawford vs. Andrey Klimov this Saturday on HBO

By Boxing News - 10/01/2013 - Comments

crawford1111By Allan Fox: #1 WBO lightweight contender Terence Crawford (21-0, 16 KO’s) will be in action this Saturday night against undefeated #6 IBF, #11 WBO, Andrey Klimov (16-0, 8 KO’s) in a scheduled 10 round bout on the undercard of the Miguel Cotto vs. Delvin Rodriguez card on HBO at the Amway Center, in Orlando, Florida, USA.

This is kind of a step down for Crawford from his last fight against Alejandro Sanabria. Crawford stopped the hard hitting Sanabria in the 6th round last June.

The 31-year-old Klimov’s claim to fame was a controversial 10 round majority decision win over John Molina last June in Shelton, Washington, USA. That was a very questionable win for Klimov because Molina had landed by far the harder shots, and he was almost as busy as Klimov.

It’s difficult to understand what the judges were looking at in giving Klimov the win in that fight because he was getting nailed by really hard shots from Molina the entire fight.

Crawford is still waiting for a title shot against WBO lightweight champion Ricky Burns. With the broken jaw that Burns suffered in his recent win over Raymundo Beltran, it’s likely that Crawford won’t get a fight agaisnt Burns until late 2014, if at all.

It’s going to take Burns a long time to heal from the broken jaw, and when he does he’s probably going to take another optional title defense rather than face Crawford. That means that we’ll likely not see Crawford get a shot at the WBO title until 2015. Burns will have to fight him by then or else he’ll have the title stripped from him.

Crawford, 26, will have the speed and power advantage over Klimov in this fight, and that should be more than enough to get Crawford the win. Klimov likes to come forward an lot looking to throw punches, and that will make it really easy for Crawford to land his big counter shots. Klimov has a good chin, but he’s going to be getting a lot in this fight by shots that he doesn’t see coming.



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