By Allan Fox: 39-year-old former WBC super middleweight champion Anthony Mundine (47-6, 27 KOs) feels very confident that he’ll be able to defeat #5 WBC Sergey Rabchenko (25-1, 18 KOs) if they wind up facing each other in a rematch in 2015.
The two fighters faced each other last November with Mundine winning a controversial 12 round split decision. Mundine was fighting at home at the Hisense Arena, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. That put added pressure on the Belarussian Rabchenko to do a little extra in each round in order to get the decision.
The judges scored the fight 115-113 and 116-112 for Mundine, and 115-113 for Rabchenko. However, many boxing fans felt that either Rabchenko won or it should have been scored a draw. It clearly wasn’t one of Mundine’s best performances during his career, but he’s starting to show his age. Earlier in 2014, Mundine was easily beaten by the 37-year-old Joshua Clottey in a fight that was totally dominated by Clottey.
“At the end of the day, I’m more than happy to whoop his [backside] again, but this time I will do it worse,” Mundine said via AAP as quoted by theaustralian.com.au.
The World Boxing Council hasn’t yet said anything about the two fighters facing each other again.
It would be in Mundine’s best interest to face Rabchenko again in order to prove that he can beat him a second time but without controversy this time. While Mundine doesn’t see his win as a controversial bout many boxing fans do and that’s the whole problem. Mundine can’t really move forward to bigger and better things if he has something like this dragging him down.
Mundine, #4 WBC, is hoping to get a fight against a top fighter in order to move his career forward. Rabchenko is still a top five contender in the junior middleweight division so Mundine can’t go wrong in facing him a second time. If Mundine is going to fight another top contender then he’s going to need to be careful in who he faces, because there are a lot of quality fighters at 154 who would likely beat Mundine if given the chances.
Fighters like the Charlo brothers, Clottey, Saul Alvarez, Vanes Martirosyan and Austin Trout would all likely be far too good for Mundine to beat them at this point in his career. He might be able to beat Trout, but Mundine would struggle badly with the rest of the fighters on that list.
Mundine is in a tough situation right now. If he moves up to 160, he’d likely be out of his league against guys like Gennady Golovkin, Miguel Cotto, Daniel Jacobs and Jermain Taylor. He might be able to beat Andy Lee, but getting a fight against him could prove to be difficult.
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