By Scott Gilfoid: When some boxing fans take a look at the little 5’5” Carl Frampton (17-0, 12 KO’s), they see a guy who lacks the major power and skills to hang with the best fighters in the super bantamweight division like WBC champion Leo Santa Cruz and WBA/WBO champion Guillermo Rigondeaux. Indeed, it’s hard to look at any of Frampton’s fights and see him being able to compete with either of those talents, but former two division world champion Ricky Hatton believes that Frampton has world class skills of the highest type.
Hatton thinks that Frampton will prove that this Friday night when he faces 35-year-old Hugo Fidel Cazares (40-7-2, 27 KO’s) in a WBC 122lb eliminator bout at the Odyssey Arena, Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom.
“If people are unsure about Carl Frampton being world class, they are going to see for sure that he is world class and by beating this guy Cazares, he will prove to everyone that he is worthy of a title shot with Leo Santa Cruz,” Hatton said to the Belfast Telegraph. “I saw him in his last fight with Jeremy Parodi and you could see maturity about his performance.”
Nah, a win for Frampton over the 35-year-old Cazares will just prove that Frampton can beat an older fighter who is fighting way out of his original weight class.
Hatton is crowing about Frampton’s win over a guy he shouldn’t have been fighting in the first place due to his limited ability. Parodi was some guy that Frampton’s team picked out for him to fight, He wasn’t anywhere near the same class as the top 20 fighters. Indeed, I didn’t even have Parodi ranked in the top 25, and I was wondering why Frampton was fighting this guy instead of the talents in the division like Fernando Montiel, Vic Darchinyan, Wilfredo Vasquez Jr. and Victor Terrazaz.
These are the good super bantamweight contenders. I don’t rate Parodi at all. And I don’t see Cazares, a fighter who is getting long in the tooth at 35, as being a top super bantamweight either. The World Boxing Council has a weird way of ranking guys that other sanctioning bodies don’t recognize as being top talents. I often see a lot of older guys ranked highly by the WBC for some reason. I’m not sure why they do it, but WBC always has at least 1 older timer ranked highly by their organization.
I honestly can’t see Frampton proving anything on Friday night if he beats Cazares. To me, it’ll just prove that the WBC has a ranking system that needs a major overhaul so that they can skim out the guys that really don’t deserve to be at the top. I think was a fine little fighter when he was fighting in the light flyweight and super flyweight divisions many years ago. But even in those divisions, Cazares wasn’t all that great, as he showed in his losses to Ivan Calderon and Tomonobu Shimizu. Those guys were able to out-box him, and we’re talking about losses that happened a long time ago. Cazares is definitely getting up there in age, and is fighting in a division that I don’t think he should be fighting at.
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