Algieri offered Pacquiao fight on November 22nd – Breaking News!

By Boxing News - 07/08/2014 - Comments

algieri422By Chris Williams: In a not so surprising move, Bob Arum of Top Rank has reportedly offered WBO light welterweight champion Chris Algieri (20-0, 8 KO’s) a fight against Arum’s No.1 money maker Manny Pacquiao (56-5-2, 38 KOs) for a fight on November 22nd in Macao, China.

This offer is obviously contingent on the Algieri’s injured eye healing from his recent controversial 12 round split decision win over Ruslan Provodnikov from last June. Algieri has 4 months for his eye to heal before the November 22nd fight.

“I hope we’ll be able to get Joe [Degardia] on the phone and we’ll be able to button this up,” Arum said the NYdailynews. “We’re talking serious now with the idea of making the fight. It’s not [BULL]. Now, whether it gets made or not I don’t know. But I can tell you the fight is there for Chris.”

This is a disappointing fight in the eyes of a lot of boxing fans, because Algieri has very little power to speak of, and he’s not particularly fast either. There’s not much in Algieri’s game that gives him any kind of chance of beating someone like Pacquiao or even many other fighters at 147.

Ruslan Provodnikov would stand a better chance at beating Pacquiao than Algieri, because he can at least punch and put a dent in Pacquiao’s chin if he landed one of his big power shots. With Algieri, he’s totally defensive, and can’t punch with any kind of power. The only way Algieri would have a chance of beating Pacquiao would be for him to put on his track shoes and hope to steal a decision by jabbing, running and holding all night long.

For some reason Arum likes the Pacquiao-Algieri fight. It could be that Algieri’s lack of power makes him a safe bet for Pacquiao, because there’s little chance that the Pacquiao gravy train will come off the tracks in this fight because Algieri brings nothing to the ring that would worry Pacquiao. Algieri would struggle against the best light welterweights like Lucas Matthysse, Danny Garcia, Lamont Peterson, Viktor Postol and Thomas Dulorme.

If Arum is going to make the Pacquiao-Algieri fight, then he’s going to need to scrape up some cash for a decent undercard because this fight is not going to interest enough casual boxing fans to bring to the 1 million pay-per-view mark. Asking boxing fans to pay $70 to see Pacquiao destroy the feather-fisted Algieri is likely going to turn off a lot of fans. Unless Arum loads the undercard with his best fighters – Julio Cesar Chavez Jr, Nonito Donaire and Mikey Garcia – then I see the fight doing about 400,000 pay-per-view buys. In other words, a huge disappointment in terms of buys.

If HBO has a say so in this matter, they might want to veto this decision and tell Arum they want a little more entertaining opponent for Pacquiao. If HBO isn’t putting on Guillermo Rigondeaux’s super bantamweight fights, then it doesn’t make sense for them to rubber stamp Arum’s selection of Algeiri for a Pacquiao opponent, because I see him not nearly as entertaining as a fighter like Rigondeaux. Arum should be trying to get someone like Lucas Matthysse, Amir Khan or Danny Garcia for Pacquiao.



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