By Scott Gilfoid: Britain’s James DeGale (20-1, 14 KOs) believes that his fight next month against American talent Andre Dirrell (24-1, 16 KOs) on May 23rd will be his coming out party when the two of them face each other for the vacant IBF super middleweight title that former IBF champ Carl Froch recently relinquished.
DeGale missed out on what would have been a big payday against Froch, and now DeGale has what some boxing fans see as a tougher task in trying to deal with the speedy quick and powerful Dirrell instead.
Needless to say, it’s not a good match-up for the slower, flat-footed DeGale simply because Dirrell does everything better than he does in my view, and is like a better version in every department. DeGale is slightly younger than Dirrell, but he doesn’t fight that way. Dirrell appears to be the younger fighter in the ring.
DeGale-Dirrell will be fighting each other at the Agganis Arena, in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. The venue of the fight greatly favors Dirrell, who comes from Flint, Michigan.
“When I win my world title on May 23 it will open all kinds of doors,” DeGale said via Sky Sports News HQ. “Fights with Carl Froch, if he wants to fight me? There is George Groves, if he wants to fight me? But there are bigger fights than them out there, trust me. There are unification fights. There is Andre Ward, Arthur Abraham. After I win the world title that’s what I want to do. I want to be in big fights with the big names and the big titles.”
I hate to say it but DeGale is sounding like he’s having a little bit of a pipedream of talking about all the doors that will be opened if he beats Dirrell. It reminds me of the character Lennie Small from the book Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. Lennie is always telling his friend George Milton about how they’re one day going to be “living off the fat of the land” and being able to tend to rabbits on their own place. Ultimately it doesn’t work out well for Lennie. Like Lennie and his dreams of having his own place with rabbits, I don’t think DeGale is going to realize his dream of beating Dirrell and getting doors opened for him left and right for big fights against the likes of Froch and Groves.
Don’t get me wrong; it’s a nice pipedream that DeGale has, but it just doesn’t seem grounded in reality when you look at the two fighters side by side and watch them fight. The speed, or lack thereof, from DeGale is just markedly slower than Dirrell. And while DeGale has put together a 10-fight win streak since he was beaten by Groves in 2011, DeGale hasn’t fought anyone good during those 10 fights, and two of his wins were controversial in my mind. I had DeGale losing to Piotr Wilczewski and Hadillah Mohoumadi.
Even if you gave DeGale victories in those two fights, you can’t deny that they were very, very close affairs. They shouldn’t have been close though. If DeGale was the real deal, he should have been able to wipe those guys out instead of go life and death with them both. I mean, if you put Dirrell in with either of those guys, it would total wipe outs with Dirrell destroying both of them, yet DeGale couldn’t do that and arguably lost both fights in my view. Since then, DeGale has fought lesser opposition and of course has looked better because of it. He’s not improved as a fighter in my mind; he’s just lowered the level of his opposition. It’s an old trick. A fighter struggles, and his management than back off from better opposition and put him in with weaker guys, and all of a sudden boxing fans start to believe the fighter is getting better as he’s getting older. It doesn’t work that way. Fighters generally don’t get better as they age. The things changes is the opposition.
DeGale said “My time is here and I am going to be crowned the IBF world champion,” he said. “Travelling doesn’t worry me – I like it.”
I don’t see it happening for DeGale. That doesn’t mean he still can’t get big fights against Froch and Groves in the future, but I think they’ll have to choose to fight him with a defeat on his record from Dirrell. If they have no interest in fighting DeGale, then they’ll have a good excuse for not facing him by pointing out that he was beaten by Dirrell. I see Groves as soon being in the same boat as DeGale after he faces Dirrell’s brother, WBC super middleweight champion Anthony Dirrell, later this year. I think Anthony Dirrell is going to stop Groves in lightning fashion with a big right hand to the head.
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