By Aragon Garcia: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum says he’s planning on scheduling the light-welterweight undisputed championship fight between WBC/WBO champ Jose Ramirez and IBF/WBA champion Josh Taylor for early May in the United States.
According to Talk Sport, Arum says Taylor (17-0, 13 KOs) will come over early to the U.S to train for the fight with Ramirez 26-0, 17 KOs). All four titles – IBF, WBA, WBC, and WBO – will be on the line for the Ramirez vs. Taylor fight.
Staging the fight in Southern California makes the most sense because that’s where Ramirez’s fan base is located.
But with the pandemic creating a massive amount of problems in California right now, especially Southern California, they may need to stage the fight elsewhere.
It would be better for Arum to wait on scheduling the Ramirez – Taylor fight for later this year in the fall, considering there’s too much money that will be lost if they place this fight behind closed doors without a crowd.
Even if the fight takes place in front of a limited-sized crowd, there’s still massive money that will be sacrificed.
Ramirez, 28, looked great in his last fight, beating Viktor Postol by a 12 round decision last August. That was one of Ramirez’s best performances with the way he took the fight to Postol, and outworked him over 12 rounds.
Taylor looked great in his last fight as well, beating his IBF mandatory Apinun Khongsong by a first-round knockout. That guy like he didn’t belong inside the same thing with Taylor.
The International Boxing Federation had given Khongsong a #1 ranking with their organization, but he had never beaten anyone talented enough for him to rate that high ranking.
As a result, Khongsong wasn’t ready for the kind of offensive firepower that Taylor had at his disposal on the night of their fight.
It’s going to be a different story for Taylor when he gets in there with the 2012 U.S Olympian Ramirez, who is blue-chip talent and already proven at the pro level.
If Taylor is going to beat Ramirez, he’s going to have to bring his A-game, and fight a lot better than he did in his narrow 12 round majority decision victory over Regis Prograis in 2019.
Ramirez is going to watch that fight and pick up key elements that he can use to defeat Taylor in May. One thing that Prograis exposed in Taylor’s game was his inability to fight on the outside at a high level. Despite being tall for a light-welterweight at 5’10”, Taylor prefers to fight on the inside, and he’s quite good at that.
Prograis fought Taylor’s fight by staying on the inside, and he paid for it in losing the fight. In the championship rounds, Prograis got the better of Taylor when he took the match to the outside.