By Chris Williams: Trainer Freddie Roach believes his fighter WBC light welterweight champion Viktor Postol (28-0, 12 KOs) is better than WBO 140lb champion Terence Crawford (28-0, 20 KOs), and he sees the 5’11” Ukrainian beating him on Saturday night.
Roach says he saw the 28-year-old Crawford coming out of the sauna this week, and he thinks he could be battling with the weight to get down to the 140lb limit for the fight. This could play into Postol’s hands if Crawford is weakened from losing weight.
Crawford and Postol will be fighting on HBO pay-per-view at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. The fight is probably not even close to being worthy of a PPV event, but their promoter Bob Arum wanted the fight to take place in July and HBO didn’t have any available dates for a non-PPV fight on their scheduled.
Arum is hoping for the best as far as PPV sales go. Arum already lost the co-feature bout between Gilberto “Zurdo” Ramirez vs. Dominic Britsch after Ramirez suffered a hand injury that led him to pull out of the fight. The co-feature fight now is featherweight Oscar Valdez vs. Matias Carlos Adrian Rueda. The two are fighting for the vacant WBO featherweight title that was recently vacated by Vasyl Lomachenko. It’s a good fight, but it’s probably not nearly good enough to bring in PPV sales unfortunately.
“Just box I think, and use his jab. Set everything up, which is something he does naturally anyway, but he’s got a great left hand and he’s got a lot of power in the right hand now,” said Roach about Postol to Fighthub.com. “He’s sitting down on the power shots and he’s more of a complete fighter now. Postol is a complete fighter. Crawford is a very good fighter, he is, but I think we’re better.”
Arum isn’t coming right out and saying he hopes Crawford will win the fight, but with his constant mentioning of him as a potential next opponent for Manny Pacquiao on November 5, it’s not hard to read who he’s hoping will win this fight. Arum says he thinks Crawford is the next big star in boxing. For him to be saying that, it tells me that he believes that he’ll beat Postol on Saturday.
Crawford is already a 6 to 1 favorite to win the fight. I’m guessing that the same oddsmakers that have Crawford the favorite over Postol are the same ones that had Lucas Matthysse the favorite to beat Postol last October. Postol pulled off the upset in that fight by stopping Matthysse in the 10th round of a one-sided fight.
“Yeah, that’s going to play out really well for us,” said Roach. “I think Crawford will have a little bit more trouble trying to get to us, trying to get inside. And when I sent Viktor to the buffet this morning to get a little breakfast I saw Terence Crawford coming out of the sauna, so I wonder who’s having trouble making weight.”
Crawford, 5’8”, is three inches shorter than the 5’11” Postol, and he’s giving up three inches in reach as well. Crawford likes to do a lot of jabbing in his fights. It’ll be interesting to see if he can win by jabbing. I think Crawford will be forced to abandon his jab if he’s unable to land it. He’ll have to come forward and try and land right hands. That’ll leave him open for Postol’s right hands that he likes to throw.