By Scott Gilfoid: After his victory over Andre Dirrell last Saturday, James DeGale (21-1, 14 KOs) claimed that WBA super middleweight champion Andre Ward (27-0, 14 KOs) would never choose to fight him. It’s unclear where DeGale was going with this comment.
Did he mean that Ward wouldn’t waste his time fighting a guy like him, or did DeGale mean that Ward was afraid of fighting him for whatever reason? I can’t imagine a talent like Ward would be hesitant to fight a guy like DeGale, who really just scraped by Dirrell last Saturday.
I had Dirrell winning the fight based on him taking rounds 1, 4-10 and 12. If Ward saw the Dirrell-DeGale fight, I’m sure he had no fear of what he saw from DeGale, especially the way he gassed out after the 4th round and did almost nothing until the 11th.
“Me and him [Andre Dirrell] are the two best super middleweights in the world,” DeGale said to RingTV.com. “There’s Andre Ward, but me and him are next in line. Listen, Andre Ward wouldn’t fight me. I’m telling you he won’t fight me. I want to unify the titles.”
This would be interesting if Ward called DeGale’s bluff by choosing to fight him. It would be good to see if DeGale changed his tune about Ward then. I wish I could see DeGale’s promoter Eddie Hearn agreeing to let him fight Ward, but I just can’t see it. If Ward said he wanted the fight with DeGale, I wouldn’t be surprised if Hearn then said that he had to come to the UK to take the fight. Hearn can’t ask Ward to come to Nottingham because DeGale isn’t from there. If he asked Ward to come to London, I think he’d agree to that if the money is right. There’s nothing in DeGale’s game that would cause Ward to hesitate for a second in taking that fight.
Ward has a tune-up fight next month against Paul Smith (35-5, 20 KOs) on June 20th at the Oracle Arena in Oakland, California. This is Ward’s first fight since his one-sided win over a very good fighter in Edwin Rodriguez. Ward made it easy in beating Rodriguez. I would favor Rodriguez over DeGale any day of the week. Rodriguez is now fighting at light heavyweight after moving up in weight in 2014, but I think he’s a much better fighter than DeGale. If Rodriguez could lose some weight and come back down to 168, I think he’d totally dominate DeGale.
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