By Allan Fox: WBC lightweight champion Devin Haney says he’s going to “handicap” the things that unified 135-lb champion George Kambosos Jr does best and take them away from him.
Once Haney has Kambosos’ attributes effectively neutralized, he’d going to be at his mercy, defensiveness to stop his attacks.
Haney (27-0, 15 KOs) will be fighting the 28-year-old Australian Kambosos (20-0, 10 KOs) on June 5th for the undisputed lightweight championship at the Marvel Stadium, Melbourne, Australia.
Kambosos’s win over an injured & weight-drained Teofimo Lopez last November has gone to his head, giving him an inflated sense of his potential, and it’s shocking how the win has affected him.
The best thing Kambosos has going for him is the fact that he’s the A-side, and he was able to use that advantage to stage the Haney fight in Australia.
With Haney being the visitor, he’s going to need to make it conclusive for him to defeat Kambosos because he lacks the power to score a knockout.
“They say that I’m boring, but Devin Haney does what Devin Haney does good,” Haney said to DAZN Boxing Show. “It’s hard to get me off my game. I’ve been doing this for so long. But what I’ll do is handicap George of his best things, his best attributes, the things he does best.”
It’ll be interesting to see whether Kambosos will have a good plan B to fall back on when Haney takes away his counter punching and his power game. If the fight goes down to a jabbing contest, Kambosos won’t stand a chance.
“I want to make the [Vasily] Lomachenko fight,” Haney stated. “I want to make the Gervonta Davis fight. Ryan Garcia is still on the list. I want to make the biggest fights happen.”
“Tagoe wasn’t a credible opponent, and Ryan Garcia talked this knockout stuff, but he didn’t knockout Tagoe, so how much of a puncher is he really?
“When you’re talking all this knockout s***, it doesn’t matter if you’re trying to survive or not. You’re going to do what you got to do to get him out of there,” said Haney when told that Ryan didn’t knockout Emmanuel Tagoe because he was defensive.
“We were cordial and cool before the Teo fight and after my fight with Jojo Diaz. I think there’s some trash-talk going in, and I feel like he doesn’t really know how to talk trash-talk because some things are off-limits, you just don’t say.
“He’s a grown man and he knows the definition of the word ‘boy’ and the type of language that he’s using. I don’t respect it at all, and I don’t tolerate it at all,” said Haney.
