By Dan Ambrose: Jean Pascal wasn’t too impressed with the level of opposition for WBC light heavyweight champion Adonis Stevenson in his mismatch last Friday night against a badly over-matched Dmitry Sukhotsky.
This was Stevenson’s fourth stay busy level opponent since he won the WBC title in June of 2013. Since then, Stevenson has beaten the following challengers: Tavoris Cloud, Tony Bellew, Andrzej Fonfara and Sukhotskiy. You can make a strong argument that all four of them were stay busy type opponents rather than challengers that had a real chance of beating Stevenson.
Pascal is going to be busy getting ready for his title challenge against IBF/WBA/WBO light heavyweight champion Sergey Kovalev on March 14th. However, in the meantime, Pascal would like to see Stevenson face unbeaten #10 WBA Artur Beterbiev (7-0, 7 KOs) in an optional title defense, because he’d like to see how Stevenson does against the unbeaten Russian fighter. Beterbiev has been knocking everyone out he’s faced, and he did a much better job of destroying Tavoris Cloud recently than Stevenson did.
“If he has another voluntary defense, I would love to see him fight Beterbiev. I think that’s the only way he can save face and start to rebuild his image, which for some reason he felt like destroying in 2014,” Pascal said via RingTV.com.
Beterbiev would be a very tough fight for Stevenson at this point, because Beterbiev is really powerful, and he does a good job of getting to the inside on his opponents. Beterbiev is a lot like Andre Ward with the way he smothers his opponents by getting in close and staying there.
If Beterbiev could get past Stevenson’s left hand, which is really his only weapon in his arsenal, then Stevenson would be forced to fight Beterbiev at close quarters. I’d have favor Beterbiev in a fight like that.
The only thing Beterbiev would need to do is not waste time standing on the outside, because he’d be easy pickings for Stevenson if he remains at a distance. Beterbiev would need to fight like he did against his recent opponent Jeff Page Jr and against Cloud for him to beat Stevenson.
It’s not likely that Stevenson’s adviser Al Haymon would match him up against a puncher like Beterbiev in an optional title defense. That’s a fight where Beterbiev would absolutely need to be the WBC mandatory challenger for him to get a fight against Stevenson, because Beterbiev brings a lot of the same things to the table that Kovalev does in terms of punching power.
“It’s great that the WBC has gotten in on trying to force Adonis to make a real fight,” Stevenson said.
The World Boxing Council has mandated that the winner of the Kovalev vs. Pascal fight will be the WBC mandatory challenger for Stevenson. This is kind of an unheard of thing to do, but it shows you that the WBC is serious about wanting to force Stevenson to face a high quality opponent. Either way, Stevenson is going to be looking at facing a good opponent in 2015 with him either facing Kovalev or Pascal.
As for Beterbiev, he’s ranked #13 by the WBC, so we’re probably looking at two years or more before he’s in position to fight for the WBC title if Stevenson is able to hold on that long as the WBC champion.
At 37, it’s hard to picture Stevenson being able to hold on for another two years as the WBC champ unless he can hold onto his blazing hand speed as he ages more.
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