By Dan Ambrose: If Andre Ward gets past Sullivan Barrera next month on Marcy 26, he’ll be facing IBF/WBA/WBO light heavyweight champion Sergey Kovalev on November 19. That’s the working date for the Kovalev-Ward fight, according to Dan Rafael.
Ward has to get past the hard hitting Barrera first in their fight on HBO PPV. There’s also the possibility that Ward will be taking another fight before the Kovalev fight, as it looks like HBO isn’t counting Ward’s pull out from last November as his first fight of his three-fight contract with them.
There had been some speculation that HBO was counting that as Ward’s first fight of the contract. Ward pulled out of the November 21st Miguel Cotto vs. Saul “Canelo” Alvarez fight card due to tenderness in his right knee.
The Kovalev-Ward fight will be the biggest fight for Ward since his win over Carl Froch in 2011. It’s taken Ward all these years to get a big fight. Even then, we don’t know if Ward will even get to the fight because he still needs to beat the 33-year-old Barrera, and that could prove to be quite difficult. Barrera can really punch and he’ll be bouncing his big shots off Ward’s chin.
HBO isn’t likely going to let Ward take a soft opponent if he chooses to fight in the summer to get ready for the November fight against Kovalev. This means that Ward is going to need to take two risky fights before he meets up with Kovalev. That’s not a good thing. It might be better for Ward to take the Kovalev fight without another tune-up fight because Ward might not get to past the next test, especially if HBO insists on Ward taking on a quality opponent rather than someone in the same class as Paul Smith.
Ward hasn’t fought since last summer when he stopped Paul Smith in the 9th round in June of last year. It was a good win for Ward, but it didn’t really prove anything due to the fact that Smith was coming off of back to back defeats at the hands of WBO super middleweight champion Arthur Abraham.
Kovalev (29-0-1, 26 KOs) wiped out Jean Pascal in the 7th round in his last fight on January 30 at the Bell Centre, in Montreal, Canada. It’s surprising that HBO agreed to put that fight on rather than turning it down, because Kovalev had stopped Pascal just last year in March of 2015 in an eight round knockout. There was no reason at all to have the same two fighters meet up for a rematch other than there fighting bringing in good ratings.
The fans knew who was going to win the rematch, and it just a waste of time to have the fight take place again. Hopefully, HBO doesn’t keep showing needless rematches between Kovalev and fighters that he knocks out. It would be better to have Kovalev at fight new guys that he hasn’t knocked out before, even if they’re well-known or popular. Pascal needs to start over against someone else rather than having him trotted out over and over for Kovalev.
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