By Scott Gilfoid: The December 19th fight between WBO middleweight champion Andy Lee (34-2, 24 KOs) and #1 WBO Billy Joe Saunders (22-0, 12 KOs) could be televised by HBO Championship Boxing. HBO is evaluating whether to televise the fight or not. The fight is taking place at the Manchester Arena in Manchester, UK.

The likely reason why HBO is thinking of televising the fight is because it would help build up a future unification fight between the winner of the Lee-Saunders fight against IBF/IBO/WBA heavyweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin in 2016.

However, the only way we’ll see a unification fight is if Lee defeats Saunders, because we’ve already heard Saunders say he’s not interested in facing Golovkin. I doubt that Saunders will change his mind about not wanting to get inside the ring with the hard hitting Golovkin.

About the worst thing that can happen is Saunders winning the fight because then we can pretty much forget about a Golovkin unification fight forever.

“I’m told HBO is considering picking up U.S rights to televise Andy Lee Boxing vs. Billy Joe Saunders on Dec. 19. #boxing,” Dan Rafael said on his Twitter.

This will be a decent fight for HBO to televise, as long as they include it as part of a package deal with a more prominent fight that the U.S fans will be interested in seeing. If HBO tries to just go with Lee vs. Saunders in the main event, then I don’t see the fight bringing in good ratings. Those guys are too obscure to attract huge ratings.

Lee has a good chance of winning this fight if he can apply some pressure on Saunders, and force the guy to fight hard for a full three minutes of every round. Saunders blows up in weight between fights, and the strain of taking off all that lard seems to cause him to wear down in the later rounds of his fights.

Saunders has been matched against such incredibly awful opposition most of his career that he rarely has to go deep into his fights. But we saw him fade badly last November in the second half of his contest with Chris Eubank Jr.

If a fighter like Eubank Jr. can wear down Saunders then I think Lee can do the same thing if he’s smart. The problem that Lee, 31, has is he’s got stamina problems of his own. If he tries to push a fast pace, he could very well gas out and wind up getting knocked out like he was in his knockout defeats at the hands of Brian Vera and Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. in the past.

Those guys fought at a fast pace, forcing Lee to fight harder than he was capable of doing. By the 7th round in both contests, Lee was exhausted and knocked out. This was when Lee was younger, so I can’t see him having better stamina now that he’s older at 31.

Saunders, 26, looked really flabby in his last fight against Yoann Bloyer last July. Saunders weighed in at 173lbs for that fight, and looked to be in the 190s the night of the fight.