By Charles Brun: Josh Warrington says he wants Mauricio Lara to unseat fellow countryman, WBA featherweight champion Leigh Wood next Saturday night on February 18th.
The younger and stronger, 24-year-old Lara will be marching into Wood’s home territory next Saturday night to rip away his WBA 126-lb belt and make an example of him as he did against Warrington when the two meet at the Motorpoint Arena in Nottingham, England.
Wood insists he’s going to stand his ground and meet fire with fire against Lara on the night, but that’s hard to believe, given how Leigh was almost knocked out by the feather-fisted Michael Conland nearly a year ago in his last fight in March 2022. Since that fight, Wood has been on the shelf, collecting dust, licking his wounds from his grueling battle against Conlan.
“He [WBA featherweight champion Leigh Wood] has a big fan base with the Nottingham fans, and I’ve got big support from the people of Leeds, so it’s a stadium fight, isn’t it?” said Josh Warrington to iFL TV about a potential future fight between him and Leigh Wood if he’s victorious in his title defense against Mauricio Lara nast
“With that being said, I said to him [Wood] the other day, ‘Nothing personal, but I want Lara to beat him.’ That’s [for] no other reason than because I want to fight Lara again. Simple as that,” said Warrington.”If Lara comes through the fight with Wood, he’ll be [WBA 126-lb] champion then. I’ll have the fight with Lara, beat him. Then the carrot will be there to dangle for [Luis Alberto] Lopez.
“Maybe I could do what I did before and be victorious again. I move to lightweight and see what I can do there,” said Warrington.
It sounds like Warrington is dreaming because he’s not going to beat Lara in their trilogy match, and he most certainly won’t avenge his recent loss to Luis Alberto Lopez from last December.
With the way Warrington performed against Lopez, he should have been penalized repeatedly for throwing rabbit punches and head-butting the Mexican native.
Lopez continually looked at the referee for help in the later rounds, wanting him to step in to control the rough-housing from Warrington, but it didn’t happen.
The brave 29-year-old Lopez was left to fend for himself and deal with Warrington’s roughhouse tactics, but to his credit, he regained his composure and boxed his way to a 12 round majority decision.
Warrington (31-2-1, 8 KOs) is burning with the need to avenge his humiliating ninth round knockout loss to the then-unheralded fringe contender Lara (25-2-1, 18 KOs) in February 2021 in London. It had to have been a terribly embarrassing experience for Warrington to be flattened by Lara in the way he was.
Josh then made his humiliation even worse by going whole billy goat in the rematch in September 2021 in front of a packed crowd of his supporters in Leeds. Sadly, Warrington looked like he didn’t even try and win.
Like an angry goat let loose inside the ring, Warrington repeatedly lowered his head and charged forward, slamming into the face of Lara until he was a bloody mess, resulting in the contest being stopped after two rounds and shockingly being ruled s two-round technical draw.
Unless the judges counted Warrington’s head-butts as punches, he didn’t come close to winning either of the two rounds, as Lara was the one landing all the actual punches in the fight.
Some would argue that Warrington’s performance in the second fight with Lara was far worse than in the first because it looked to many that his intent was to ensure that he wasn’t knocked out again. Hence, we saw a whole slew of head-butts.
If you’re Warrington, it might be better to cut your losses and admit that Lara is the better man and that he’ll never be able to beat him, no matter what he tries.
At least if Warrington did that, he could save himself a second knockout and take on Wood after he’d dealt with by Lara next Saturday. There will still be fans that would want to see Warrington face Wood, even if he gets blown out of the water by Lara.