By Chris Williams: Top Rank plans on announcing the title fight next week between WBO super featherweight champion Roman “Rocky” Martinez (29-2-3, 17 KOs) and Vasyl Lomachenko (5-1, 3 KOs) on Thursday. The two fighters will be facing each other in two months from now on June 11 on HBO at Madison Square Garden in New York.
Also on the card will be WBO Latino lightweight champion Felix Verdejo (21-0, 14 KOs) defending his strap against an opponent still to be determined. Hopefully, Top Rank will match Verdejo against a good opponent because it’s time that he starts facing better opposition.
Fans need to find out if Verdejo is any good or not. There’s a lot of hype on him, but he looked really poor in his fight against William Silva last February. Siva isn’t a major player in the lightweight division, yet he gave Verdejo all kinds of problems. Top Rank should start putting Verdejo in with the best fighters in the lightweight division now, because they’ve to find out if he’s going to be a good fighter or not. If they wait a long time before they start matching him against quality fighters, they may discover too late that he doesn’t have the talent to cut it against the best in the sport. It’s better to find out sooner so they can cut their losses and look in another direction for a guy that has world title champion skills. From what I saw of Verdejo against Silva, I don’t see him as having the goods.
Lomachenko, 28, will be moving up from featherweight to challenge Martinez for his WBO super featherweight title. This is a move that Lomachenko should have made a long time ago because he has no one to fight in the featherweight division. At least in moving up to super featherweight, he can fight Roman Martinez three or four times depending on how many times their promoter Bob Arum wants to keep them on the rematch cycle.
Lomachenko can also fight former WBA featherweight champion Nicholas Walters if the two of them can come to an agreement. Top Rank recently attempted to put a fight together between the two of them, but they couldn’t do it. Perhaps in the near future they might be able to put the fight together. If not, then Lomachenko will need to be satisfied with fighting Martinez and likely Orlando Salido.
Other options for Lomachenko are Francisco Vargas, Takashi Uchiyama, Javier Fortuna, Jose Pedraza and Miguel Berchet. There’s seven potentially good fights for Lomachenko in the super featherweight division in addition to the likely rematches he’ll be put in. Those fights could eat up several years of Lomachenko’s career.
Martinez last fought in September last year in a rematch with Salido, which was scored a draw by the judges. Few boxing fans saw that fight as a draw. They unanimously thought Salido deserved the victory. The scoring was horrible.