By Scott Gilfoid: Well, it looks like Matchroom Sport promoter Eddie Hearn, his fighter #1 IBF James DeGale (20-1, 14 KOs), and his many fans can forget about Andre Dirrell (24-1, 16 KOs) saying not to a fight against DeGale for the vacant IBF super middleweight title on April 25th.
Dirrell is saying he’s very interested in fighting for the IBF title against DeGale, and he doesn’t care if he has to go to the UK to win the title. Dirrell just wants the opportunity and he’s not going to turn down the fight.
This is bad news for DeGale and Hearn, because Dirrell, 31, is a highly talented fighter with skills that DeGale has never seen before, both as a pro nor in the amateur ranks. If DeGale can’t even conclusively beat a guy like George Groves, then it doesn’t bode too well for DeGale when he gets in there with a guy like Dirrell.
Dirrell says he’s going to beat the royal stuffing out of DeGale when he gets him inside of the ring on 4/25.
Dirrell and Hearn are currently negotiating the fight, but this is a bout that will almost surely go to purse bids unless Hearn is will to make it worthwhile for Dirrell to come to the UK to take the fight there by giving him some extra green to help ease the discomfort for him to fly all the way over and then endure all the crowd noise from the boisterous British fans.
You can bet the crowd will be making themselves heard for every DeGale miss, and perhaps singing their same football songs over and over again.
“Hell yeah that’s a fight I’d be interested in! Number one, that’s an IBF world championship fight. I’ve only fought for one championship my whole career and that was against Carl Froch in 2009,” Dirrell said via Fighthype.com. “I know I’ma beat the [expletive] out of DeGale. I’m looking forward to it!”
Oh boy, look at what Dirrell is saying. I bet DeGale won’t be too happy about that, even though DeGale is already yapping about how he’s going to knock Dirrell out. But this has got to be huge blow for DeGale, because instead of him taking on Groves, whose chin doesn’t seem to be the same after his latest knockout loss to Carl Froch, he’ll be facing a guy with huge talent in Dirrell.
This is going to be a nightmare fight for DeGale, and you have to hope that he doesn’t over-train for the fight due to worry. That’s what you sometimes see with guys who are making a huge step up in class like DeGale.
Instead of them sticking with the same training routines that got them to that place, they try and do twice as much training as they normally did in the past. What happens then is them walking into the ring looking like a human skeleton and not having enough strength to fight for more than 1 to 3 rounds.
Dirrell fought for a world title six years ago against Froch in 2009 in a nightmare bout in Notthingham. Dirrell fought well enough to win the fight by 8 to 10 rounds in the eyes of some boxing fans, yet he was given a loss for all his hard work. Now after many years, Dirrell will likely be coming back to the UK to fight another popular British fighter, but this time Dirrell is counting on the judges to get the scores right.
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