By Scott Gilfoid: WBO middleweight champion Andy Lee (34-2, 24 KOs) still hasn’t made his first title defense against former WBO title holder Peter Quillin (31-0, 22 KOs), yet Lee is already thinking well beyond that fight for a unification bout against possibly the winner of this Saturday night’s bout between WBA middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin vs. Martin Murray.
The Lee-Quillin fight will be taking place on April 11th at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York. The venue is a perfect one for Quillin, who lives in New York, so the boxing fans that show up for the fight will likely be predominately in favor of Quillin. As such, you have to assume that Quillin will beat Lee one way or another.
“I think about a unification fight all the time,” Lee said via ESPN.com. “And even though I’m now a world champion, Golovkin is still ‘the man’ in the division. He is rightly considered the No.1 middleweight in the world. Maybe this time next year we’ll be fighting for all the marbles. Though I’m sure Martin Murray will have something to say about that,” Lee said.
I don’t see what’s so magical about Lee waiting an entire year to face Golovkin. I mean, if Lee gets past Quillin, which make take a minor miracle, Lee is still going to have problems in his next defense later on in 2015, and it’ll be very difficult to imagine him winning that fight if he chooses not to face a stiff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIRJFa-BCL4
Lee will need to face #1 WBO Billy Joe Saunders, and it’s possible that Saunders could outwork Lee and score a decision win somehow. I don’t see Saunders as being able to stop Lee, because he lacks punching power. But I do believe that Saunders has the work rate to give Lee a lot of problems if he can smother his power, and take away Lee’s favorite weapon – his right hook.
Even if Lee does win his next couple of fights, he’s still going to be seen as a paper champion until he faces Golovkin and proves that he’s better than him. With Lee’s track record for getting knocked out when facing a hard puncher, I don’t see him getting beyond the Quillin fight.
The Lee-Saunders match-up would be a 50-50 affair, but the Quillin bout is going to be very, very hard for Lee to win, because he’s going to be getting hit with so many solid shots over the course of the bout.
Lee was getting dominated by his last two opponents John Jackson and Matt Korobov in the first half of those bouts, and if they didn’t end suddenly the way they did, I don’t think Lee would have been able to make it the distance. Quillin has an excellent chin, and I believe he’s going to be able to take Lee’s occasional right hook that he likes to throw.
All Quillin needs to do is make it to the deeper rounds against Lee, and he’ll have a great chance of knocking him out just as Julio Cesar Chavez Jr and Brian Vega both did in the past.
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