McWilliams Arroyo defeats Cuadras, wants Rungvisai next

By Boxing News - 02/25/2018 - Comments

Image: McWilliams Arroyo defeats Cuadras, wants Rungvisai next

By Jeff Aranow: McWilliams Arroyo pulled up a surprise upset in beating former WBC super flyweight champion Carlos Cuadras by a 12 round majority decision last Saturday night, and he now wants to fight for the title against WBC super flyweight belt.

Cuadras hurt Arroyo with a right hand in the 2nd round, but he was unable to caplitizlie on the punch by hurting him with additional punches. Cuadras faded with each progressing round after the 2n. Ciuadras power didn’t look good, and he was very, very tired.

“When the opportunity came to fight Carlos Cuadras, I knew I was ready and I knew I would win. I want to fight the winner of the main event and I will beat them also and show I am the best fighter in the division,” Arroyo said to ESPN.com.

Arroyo isn’t a great mover, and he would need to be for him to have a chance against Rungvisai. I don’t think he would handle Rungvisai’s power punches to the body and head, although Arroyo did do a good job of boxing from the outside to keep Cuadras from landing his body shots. One reason for that is Cuadras wasn’t attacking Arroyo hard by chasing him to get near enough to land his shots. Rungvisai would have little problems cutting off the ring on Arroyo and connecting with his big power shots.

McWilliams, 32, earned the right to face Rungvisai by beating Cuadras (36-3-1, 27 KOs) to win the vacant WBC Silver super flyweight title. That’s not a major title in the 115 lb. weight class, but one that the World Boxing Council has that they use to put fighters in place to fight for their major titles. In this case, Arroyo (17-3, 14 KOs) has earned the fight with Rungvisai (45-4-1, 40 KOs), who take care of business in the main event in last Saturday’s SuperFly2 card in defeating mandatory challenger Juan Francisco ‘El Gallo’ Estrada by a 12 round majority decision at the Forum in Inglewood, California. The McWilliams-Cuadras, Rungvisai-Estrada and Donnie Nietes vs. Juan Carlos Reveco fights were televised on HBO Boxing.

Cuadras says he felt tight the entire fight and he couldn’t get his punches off. Cuadras looked exhausted from the 4th round on. He was fighting with his mouth open, and his punches looked weak. It wasn’t the same Cuadras that had given Roman Gonzalez all kinds of problems in 2016. Cuadras’ conditioning looked bad for the Arroyo fight.

“For some reason I felt tight all night long, very stiff,” Cuadras said to ESPN.com. “I couldn’t let go with punches like I wanted to.”

Cuadras recently started training with Abel Sanchez, and he was supposed to be fixing his stamina problems. Cuadras’ conditioning looked worse in this fight than in his previous 2 against Juan Francisco Estrada and David Carmona. At this rate, Cuadras could see his career as a top fighter disappear. He can’t afford to take too many losses. His defeats against Roman Gonzalez and Estrada were overlooked in some regards due to his talented those fighters are, but losing to Arroyo looks really bad. Arroyo is not a championship level fighter in the super flyweight division.

Cuadras landed 127 of 776 punches for a connect percentage of 16 percent. Arroyo connected on 140 of 713 punches for a 20 percent connect rate. Cuadras is often the harder puncher in his fights, but he wasn’t in this fight. Arroyo was landing the harder punches most of the time, and that was largely because he was the better conditioned fighter. In the first 2 rounds, Cuadras was landing hard shots, but he quickly gassed out and lost his power on his punches.

Arroyo might not get the fight with Rungvisai next. That’s going to be up to Rungvisai’s management. Tom Loefler, one of the organizers of the SuperFly2 card, wants Rungvisai to fight Estrada again. However, in a poll created today by Lazysundayboxingpoll, the fans seem to prefer Naoya Inoue over Estrada by a wide margin. In fact, very few boxing fans want to see Rungvisai face Estrada a second time.

The fans want to see new blood for Rungvisai. Here are the results of the poll:

• Naoya Inoue – 45%

• Kal Yafai – 38%

• Jerwin Ancajas – 11%

• Juan Francisco Estrada – 6%

Arroyo isn’t even in the picture for a fight with Rungvisai. Maybe that’ll change once Rungvisa’s promoters discover that they can’t get him a fight against Inoue, Yafai or Ancajas. If it was so easy for Rungvisai to get fights against those guys, he would have fought them a long time ago.

Arroyo is probably not going to get the fight that he wants against Rungvisai for the time being. The win over Cuadras will keep Arroyo in the picture for an eventual title shot. As long as Arroyo doesn’t disappear for 2 years again like he did after his loss to Roman Gonzalez in 2016, he should get a title shot soon if he can keep winning while he’s waiting on Rungvisai. It’s probably going to take more than a win over Cuadras for Arroyo to get a crack at the WBC title. Arroyo doesn’t have the type of talent that suggests that he’ll beat Rungvisai.

If Cuadras can’t improve his conditioning in the future, then his career as a top fighter will be over. We’ve now seen Cuadras gas out in his last 4 fights with him losing 3 of them. Cuadras signed on with trainer Abel Sanchez to fix his stamina problems, but he looks even worse now. It’s unclear whether Cuadras is working hard enough in training camp or coming into the camp in terrible shape.