By Chris Williams: Two-time Olympic gold medalist for Ukraine Vasyl Lomachenko (1-0, 1 KO’s) is saying that he’ll be challenging WBO featherweight champion Orlando Salido (40-12-2, 28 KO’s) for his title on March 1st, according to Fightnews.com. If this fight does indeed take place, Top Rank, the promoters for the 25-year-old Lomachenko, will be taking a huge gamble by putting him out there with the had hitting and much more experienced Salido.
This would be like throwing Lomachenko to the wolves, because he did not look that good in beating Jose Ramirez by a 4th round TKO last month. Lomachenko was outworked by Ramirez and hit a lot in that short fight. If it was a fighter with any kind of power and an ability to take body shots, Lomachenko would have lost the fight.
Top Rank seems to be in a big, big hurry with Loamchenko for him to find success in a hurry rather than going slow with him. If they want to speed him up then they need to put him in with their prize WBO super featherweight champion Mikey Garcia and see how it goes for them. Of course, they’re probably not going to do that because one of them would get beaten and I’m not so sure which one. I’d guess that Garcia would get a stoppage if he could throw enough punches and handle getting hit hard in the midsection every once in a while.
Salido is a much different fighter than Ramirez, and Lomachenko’s going to find out the hard way that you don’t beat Salido unless you have huge power and throw a fair amount of shots. Loamchenko is going to need to show much better power than he did against Ramirez if he wants to have a chance of beating Salido because I don’t see him as being as strong as him.
Salido defeated Orlando Cruz last month by a 7th round TKO win to capture the vacant WBO featherweight title.
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