By Scott Gilfoid: Tony Bellew (25-2-1, 16 KOs) is expecting his fight this Saturday night against cruiserweight Mateusz Masternak (36-3, 26 KOs) to be a show stealer on the Anthony Joshua vs. Dillian Whyte card on Sky Box Office from the O2 Arena in London, UK.
The Bellew-Masternak fight will be for the vacant EBU cruiserweight title, and Bellew sees it as a 50-50 affair. While Masternak isn’t seen as one of the major players in the cruiserweight division by many boxing fans, Bellew sees him as a talented fighter who deserves to have only one defeat on his record.
Bellew thinks that Masternak deserved a win in his fight against Johnny Muller. Masternak was beaten by more than just Muller. He was stopped by Grigory Drozd and also beaten by Youri Kayembre Kalenga.
The loss to Kalenga wasn’t controversial, and I definitely saw Masternak losing to Muller. What’s interesting is that Muller was destroyed recently by Olesandr Usyk in just 3 rounds. So it stands to reason that if Masternak is losing to Muller by a close decision, and Muller is getting destroyed by Usyk, then why in the heck is Bellew fighting Masternak? I mean, I’m just saying.
If Bellew wants to make a career in the cruiserweight division, then he needs to prove that he can handle the best, right? How about Bellew fighting Usyk? I think Bellew should just get it over with and fight Usyk. At least if Bellew takes that fight now and gets blasted to kingdom come, he won’t have to worry about wasting his time in the cruiserweight division anymore. Bellew could just take off the flab that’s collected around his sides since he moved up in weight and go back down to light heavyweight the way Nathan Cleverly did after he failed at cruiserweight.
“I am not running from Masternak, he’s not going to run from me and I just envisage it being a really tough fight,” Bellew said to skysports.com. “I am anticipating a war. And it is a real 50-50 fight. It is going to be tough but I am hoping to get to him in the middle to late rounds.”
I’m assuming that Bellew and his promoter Eddie Hearn have done their homework well by scouting out Masternak’s past fights from top to bottom to make sure that this is a winnable fight for him. The thing is that even as flawed as Masternak is, I do think he’s someone that could give Bellew a lot of problems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PESKeeSg66E
I do think Bellew can beat Masternak, because I thought Masternak looked absolutely dreadful in his fights against Muller, Drozd and Kalenga. Even if I wanted to give Masternak a break by saying he came close to not losing to Muller, he still looked terrible in that fight and he definitely lost it and lost the fights to Kalenga and Drozd.
At some stage we are just going to stand there and trade – and as soon as we do that, you know it is going to be an exciting fight,” Bellew said. “I think it is going to be the fight of the night. He’s got an unjust loss on his record in South Africa – Johnny Muller – one genuine loss on there, like mine.”
Bellew has two genuine losses to Adonis Stevenson and Cleverly. The only reason why Bellew doesn’t have a whole bunch of “genuine” losses is because he hasn’t been fighting the absolutely best fighters.
If you look at Bellew’s resume, you’ll notice that he never fought Sergey Kovalev, Artur Beterbiev, Sullivan Barrera, Eleider Alvarez, or Andrzej Fonfara, when he was fighting at light heavyweight. Since moving up to cruiserweight, Bellew has failed to take on the best fighters in the division like Olesandr Usyk, Denis Lebedev, Krzysztof Glowacki, Grigory Drozd, Marco Huck, Krzystof Wlodarczyk, Ilunga Makabu and Beibut Shumenov.
I think Bellew is putting off the inevitable by facing weak cruiserweights rather than taking on the best from my above list. If Bellew takes on the fighters from my list and proves that he belongs in the division, then he should stay in this weight class. But if he takes on the guys from the list and gets smashed, then it’ll be academic that he needs to either move back down to the 175lb division or retire. It’s a waste of time for Bellew to be fighting guys like Masternak when there are far better fighters than him in the cruiserweight division.
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