By Allan Fox: #2 WBC, #5 WBO, #11 IBF light heavyweight contender Isaac Chilemba (23-2-2, 10 KOs) is pushing hard for a fight against unbeaten and untested #11 WBA, #11 WBC Artur Beterbiev (7-0, 7 KOs) for a fight that could take place on the March 14th undercard of the Sergey Kovalev vs. Jean Pascal fight at the Bell Centre in Montreal, Canada.
Chilemba’s promoters at Main Events are interested in making the fight against the 29-year-old Beterbiev. However, the negotiations have not gone anywhere as of yet because Beterbiev’s management hasn’t given him the green light for the fight.
Who knows why they’re hesitating at pulling the trigger on the offer. It could be that Beterbiev’s recent shaky performance against Jeff Page Jr last December might have Beterbiev’s management thinking that he needs more development before being put in with a guy like Chilemba.
Beterbiev was knocked down in the 1st round by Page Jr in that fight. To Beterbiev’s credit, he woke up in the 2nd round and dropped Page Jr three times before the fight was halted. The thing about that fight is that Page Jr wasn’t supposed to be competitive with Beterbiev, yet he was competitive, at least in the 1st round.
Beterbiev showed in that fight that he doesn’t have any head movement, and that he’s easy to hit. He also showed that he doesn’t use his jab at all. It was straight power punches by Beterbiev, and that made him vulnerable to getting hit by Page Jr while he was coming in. For a fighter with the kind of amateur background that Beterbiev had with his Olympic experience, it’s surprising that he still doesn’t know how to use his jab or head movement.
”I will fight Beterbiev, we have offered him fight. His camp have not accepted yet. I think they are scared @Main_Events,” Chilemba said on his twitter.
With the kind of power that Beterbiev has, he’d likely be able to beat Chilemba by smothering him with his inside attacking style of fighting. We saw Tony Bellew beat Chilemba by a 12 round decision two years ago in a fight in 2013 in which Bellew took the fight to the inside and basically clinched, wrestled and threw short little punches on the inside for 12 rounds.
Bellew learned his lesson from the first fight with Chilemba that he couldn’t stay on the outside and fight him, because Chilemba was too fast and too clever defensively for Bellew to win that kind of fight. The difference between Bellew and Beterbiev is that Bellew was throwing a lot of long punches from the outside against Chilemba in their first fight in March of 2013, and this enabled Chilemba to easily get out of the way of the shots.
With Beterbiev, he fights in close and it’s impossible to avoid getting hit by him unless you grab him. But Beterbiev is so strong, he’s able to throw with power at close range even while being held. As we saw in his fight against Tavoris Cloud, Beterbiev was able to nail Cloud with repeated left hands while his right arm was being held by Cloud on the inside.
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