By Dan Ambrose: Former light middleweight champion Demetrius Andrade could be facing unbeaten middleweight contender Sergiy Derevyanchenko (11-0, 9 KOs) on the Daniel Jacobs card on HBO Boxing on April 28 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.
ESPN is reporting that there’s a chance the 2-time former 154lb. champion Andrade (25-0, 16 KOs) to face #1 IBF Derevyanchenko in what would likely be the co-feature on Jacobs’ card on HBO. This fight could prove to be league’s better than the main event, which figures to be the 30-year-old Jacobs (33-2, 29 KOs) facing fringe contender #13 WBC Gary ‘Spike’ O’Sullivan (27-2, 19 KOs) in a mismatch.
That’s a fight that will likely have fireworks. That’s good thing you can say about Jacobs-O’Sullivan, but does anyone really think for a second that O’Sullivan has any real chance of beating Jacobs? It’s a mismatch. O’Sullivan falls apart when he faces good opposition at the world level. We saw that in the 33-year-old O’Sullivan’s losses to Chris Eubank Jr. and Billy Joe Saunders.
Jacobs’ promoter Eddie Hearn doesn’t have a lot of options to match him. Hearn signed Jacobs thinking he would have it easy putting him in with Gennady ‘GGG’ Golovkin in a rematch, and/or Saul Canelo Alvarez, but thus far neither of those fights have taken place since he added the American to his Matchroom Sport stable of fighters late last year.
Hearn matched Jacobs up against fringe contender Luis Arias in his first fight with him, and now he’s matching him against another lower ranked fighter in O’Sullivan. But in this case, O’Sullivan is arguably step down from Arias. A better fight for Jacobs would be for Hearn to have him face Andrade or Derevyanchenko instead of those 2 fighting each other. Unfortunately, Hearn won’t go after either of those guys for Jacobs to fight, because he’s making sure he doesn’t lose before he gets a crack at the winner of the GGG-Canelo fight. There’s too much money for Jacobs to make fighting Canelo or Golovkin, and Hearn isn’t going to ruin that by putting him in with Derevyanchenko or Andrade and watching him lose to one of them.
It would be surprising if Andrade, 29, accepts the fight with Derevyanchenko, because when he was talking about him recently, he didn’t seem enthusiastic about facing him. Andrade was talking about having a bicep injury, and how he’d like to fight David Lemieux. Andrade said he wouldn’t want to fight Billy Joe Saunders right now, because he wants to get more fights under his belt at 160 before he fights for a world title. Andrade moved up to middleweight last October in beating Alantez Fox by a 12 round unanimous decision. It was a good performance by Andrade.
Derevyanchenko is a 2008 Olympian from Ukraine, who now lives in New York. Derevyanchenko earned the IBF mandatory spot recently in stopping Tureano Johnson in the 12th round last August. It was an exciting fight from start to finish with tons of action. Derevyachenko now is waiting for the Gennady Golovkin vs. Saul Canelo Alvarez rematch to take place so he can look to fight the winner of that contest. The International Boxing Federation still needs to order Golovkin to defend against Derevyanchenko, because he might not take the fight until he is ordered.