By Scott Gilfoid: WBA World light heavyweight champion Juergen Braehmer (45-2, 33 KOs) will be defending his WBA title against #2 WBA contender Robin Krasniqi (43-3, 16 KOs) on March 21st in Rostock, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany.
It’s not a fight to get all that excited about, as it’s more of a par for the course for the 36-year-old Braehmer who has been matched very softly by his promoters at Sauerland since he picked up the WBA title with a win over Marcus Oliveira in December 2013.
If you think champions like Adonis Stevenson has been taking it easy since he picked up his WBC title, Braehmer has taken it easy match-making to another level with his title defenses over the likes of Pawel Glazewski, Roberto Feliciano Bolonti and Enzo Maccarinelli.
Krasniqi, 26, is a guy who arguably doesn’t deserve another world title shot after he was easily beaten by former WBO 175 pound champion Nathan Cleverly back in April 2013. Krasniqi has his last four fights since then, but against dreadful opposition, and the World Boxing Association has pushed him up to No.2 anyway.
This obviously makes things easy for Braehmer, who after this fight will likely take two optional title defenses against bottom dwellers before he’s put in another situation where he has to defend against whoever the WBA inserts as his mandatory.
“This is a fight people [in Germany] have been talking about for a long time,” Braehmer said via ESPN.com. “Now the time has come to give the fans what they want. On March 21, I will defeat Krasniqi and retain my title.”
I don’t think the German boxing fans have been talking about a fight between him and Krasniqi at all. If they are we’re probably talking a small band of fans instead of the country as a whole. I mean, why would the German fans want to see Braehmer fight a guy that was easily beaten by a limited fighter like Cleverly two years ago?
That’s really setting the bar low if the German fans are crying for a Braehmer vs. Krasniqi fight instead of pushing Braehmer to stop fighting soft jobs and face Artur Beterbiev, who clearly is world’s better than anyone that Braehmer has ever fought before.
“My dream has always been to become world champion,” Krasniqi said. “I missed my first opportunity two years ago, but this time I will take my chance and dethrone Braehmer.”
I don’t see this fight being worth much to be honest. Braehmer should be facing guys like Beterbiev, Jean Pascal, Sergey Kovalev, Adonis Stevenson, Bernard Hopkins, Lucian Bute, Andrzej Fonfara, Beibut Shumenov, Isaac Chilemna or Eleider Alvarez. Those guys are much better than the fighters that Braehmer has been fighting, and definitely a heck of a lot better than Krasniqi.
The way that Braehmer has been matched up as the WBA champion reminds me a lot of how WBO super middleweight champion Arthur Abraham has been matched up with him facing fighters like Nikola Sjekloca, Paul Smith, and Robert Stieglitz instead of much stiffer tests against the Dirrell brothers, Gilberto Ramirez, Julio Cesar Chavez Jr, and Vincent Feigenbutz.
“Braehmer vs. Krasniqi is a fight that has been on the wish list of German boxing fans for some time,” said Braehmer’s promoter Kalle Sauerland.
Sauerland has got to be kidding if he really believes that Braehmer-Krasniqi is a fight on the wish list of German fans. I can’t see how they would want to see a mismatch like this between these two guys. Krasniqi looked plain awful in his fight against Cleverly two years ago, and I can’t imagine he’s improved any since then. Why would the German fans want to see this horrible mismatch?
In Braehmer’s last mismatch, I mean, in his last title defense, he blasted out fringe contender Pawel Glazewski in one round last December. It was a predictable outcome because Glazewski had been dominated not too long before by an over-the-hill Roy Jones Jr.
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