By Scott Gilfoid: Former two division world champion Leo Santa Cruz (32-1-1, 18 KOs) is set to beat WBA Super World featherweight champion Carl Frampton (23-0, 14 KOs) in their rematch on January 28 next year, and then move forward to beat IBF featherweight champion Lee Selby in a unification match thereafter. If Santa Cruz can’t get the fight against Selby, then he’ll go after WBC champion Gary Russell Jr. in a unification match.
Santa Cruz, 28, lost his World Boxing Association title to Frampton by a controversial 12 round majority decision last July at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York. Santa Cruz appeared to win two of the first six rounds and all of the final six rounds of the contest.
However, two of the judges scored it in Frampton’s favor. Oddly enough, the crowd was on Frampton’s side rather than Santa Cruz’s side, even though Frampton is from the UK and Santa Cruz from the U.S.
There’s a large population of Frampton fans in the New York area that likely turned up to see the Irish Frampton and root for him. I had Santa Cruz winning the fight, but I was able to turn down the sound on my television set to filter out the cheering from the pro-Frampton fans. The judges obviously couldn’t do that. They sat and watched the fight while listening to the screaming for Frampton.
“For that loss I got, I want to get revenge,” he told Michelle Joy Phelps of Behind the Gloves via skysports.com. “I had a perfect record and losing to him, now I have to go out there and beat him. Beating him, it won’t erase it, but I will feel like I’m still undefeated and then after that, if we get the win, I would like to unify against Gary Russell or Lee Selby, and whoever is in that division.”
It is good news that the Frampton vs. Santa Cruz rematch will be taking place in in a neutral venue at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. At least the crowd will be potentially split half and half for the fight compared to last time Frampton and Santa Cruz fought. That was ridiculous.
Santa Cruz is going to need to forget about boxing Frampton in the rematch and focus instead on taking the fight to him the way he did in the second half of the fight last July. It was a bad idea for Santa Cruz to spend so much time focusing on trying to box Frampton last time.
Santa had the blueprint in how to beat Frampton from watching the Frampton vs. Scott Quigg fight. But instead of following that blueprint, Santa Cruz used the game plan that he employed for his fight against Abner Mares in August of last year. I guess he figured that if it worked against Mares to stand on the outside and box, it would work against Frampton.
Wrong! It was a dreadful game plan, and he should have made some adjustments earlier in the fight so that he could start pressuring the 5’5” Frampton earlier to wear him down. As it was, Santa Cruz totally wore down Frampton in the last ix rounds of the fight.
Unfortunately, the judges had banked so many rounds for Frampton in the first half of the fight, it put Santa Cruz in an impossible situation where he would have needed a knockout to get the win. Frampton won the fight by the scores of 117-111, 116-112 and 114-114. The first two scores gave Santa Cruz no credit for the way he came back strong in the second half of the fight to appear to sweep the last six rounds.
“With this fight, it’s going to be way different. My dad is going to be there the whole time,” said Santa Cruz. “I didn’t train as I had to before.”
Santa Cruz hasn’t fought since his loss to Frampton. The two of them may end up a little rusty for the fight, but I don’t expect it to be a big deal. Santa Cruz will get plenty of sparring to get him ready for the fight, and he’ll have an excellent game plan to get him ready. If Frampton is going to beat Santa Cruz again, then he’s going to need to fight a lot harder than he did last time because there’s going to be a lot of pressure put on him in the fight. I don’t think he’s going to be able to handle that pressure if he’s not ready.
I’ve got to give the edge to Santa Cruz in the rematch with Frampton, because he knows how to beat him now, and I expect him not to mess things up by trying to box like last time. It would bad news for Santa Cruz to focus on trying to box rather than to slug, because that’s clearly Framnpton’s Achilles heel.
We’ve already seen how Frampton couldn’t handle the pressure from Quigg , and now we’ve seen how Frampton couldn’t handle the pressure from Santa Cruz in the second half of their fight.
As for Selby, he’s expected to defend his International Boxing Federation featherweight title against #3 IBF Jonathan Barros (41-4-1, 22 KOs) in his next fight.
That’s going to be a tough fight for Selby, because Barros can punch and he’s a pretty fair pressure fighter when he wants to be. The 32-year-old Argentinian Barros has won his last seven fights since suffering losses to Mikey Garcia and Juan Carlos Salgado in consecutive fights in 2012. Barros has also lost to Celestino Caballero in July 2011. Selby is going to have his work cut oyut for him against Barros. If Santa Cruz is going to fight for the IBF title in a unification fight, he may wind up facing Barros rather than Selby.