By Scott Gilfoid: Matchroom Sport promoter Eddie Hearn says he’s cleared 60 percent of the obstacles for making a unification fight between WBA “regular” super bantamweight champion Scott Quigg (31-0-2, 23 KOs), who he promotes, and IBF 122lb champion Carl Frampton (21-0, 14 KOs) for a unification fight that could take place next year in February or March in the UK.
One of the two sides has given in, and appears that it’s Quigg, which makes sense given that Frampton is seen as the bigger draw of the two right now by many boxing fans. Quigg had a chance to defend his WBA strap against former four division world champion Nonito Donaire in November in a fight that would have likely seen him make his career best payday. But for some reason, Quigg and Hearn didn’t take that fight.
You can speculate that they didn’t take it because they felt like they had a good chance of getting the Frampton fight and didn’t want to risk getting exposed first by Donaire, or they may not have fancied their chances against the quicker Donaire.
I think it might be a mix of the two. It would have been a very high risk fight for Quigg to face Donaire because this is a guy with faster hand speed and better punching power than Quigg. I think it would have ended badly for Quigg.
It’s one thing beating a limited fighter like Kiko Martinez and then bragging about it, but it’s another thing altogether to take on a guy with the kind of boxing skills, hand speed and punching power like Donaire. I think it would have been Quigg’s Waterloo if he’d gone in there with Donaire. At least in facing Frampton, Quigg will get even more money in likely losing the fight.
“I had a meeting yesterday with the McGuigans and we are solving problems,” Hearn said to skysports.com. “I would say if we’re going round a horse track, we’ve probably gone over 60 per cent of the hurdles. We’re not down the home straight, but we are approaching it. There are still some big jumps on the home straight,” Hearn said.
Yeah, I wouldn’t assume the negotiations are done until they they’re 99% agreed on the particulars. Anything can mess these negotiations up, and drag it out until they have to break off the negotiations in order to keep fighting. It does neither of them any good to be just hanging around waiting month after month for Hearn and Barry McGuigan to hammer out the negotiations.
Frampton looked terrible in his last fight in beating Alejandro Gonzalez Jr. by a 12 round unanimous decision last July at the Don Haskins Convention Center, in El Paso, Texas, USA. Frampton was knocked down twice in the 1st round by the 22-year-old Gonzalez Jr.
You can blame the knockdowns on the 5’7” Gonzalez Jr. being two inches taller than the 5’5” Frampton, or you can say that the youth is starting to catch up to the aging 28-year-old Frampton. I think it might be a case of the youth starting to creep in on Frampton.
Smaller fighters are said to age faster than the bigger ones, and it’s quite possible that Frampton is starting to go downhill as a fighter. I mean, I don’t think he’s going to be able to stay on top for too much longer. The same with Quigg. The reality is neither of these guys are actually on top at 122.
Quigg and Frampton are just belt holders, nothing more than that. The fighter that is recognized by many boxing fans as the real champion at super bantamweight is WBA/WBO champion Guillermo Rigondeaux. For some reason, Quigg and Frampton don’t seem all that interested in fighting Rigondeaux. I wonder why? Some boxing fans think they’re afraid of losing and getting exposed by the Cuban fighter. Never the less, Quigg and Frampton have made zero overtures to try and get inside the ring with Rigondeaux to try and prove that they’re the real champion at super bantamweight and not just paper champions.
“We’re solving problems and we’ve solved a lot of problems and we’ve still got more to do.,” Hearn said “There seems to be a real desire from both camps to get this made.”
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