By Dan Ambrose: The World Boxing Council recently ordered for junior middleweight contenders Vanes Martirosyan (30-0, 19 KO’s) and Alfredo Angulo 19-1, 15 KO’s) to fight in an eliminator bout to fight a mandatory challenger for WBC junior middleweight champion Saul Alvarez.

However, there’s still no word whether Angulo and Martirosyan will do this, because both of them would be sticking their necks out in taking a hard fight like this and they would likely much prefer to get a title shot against Alvarez the easy way without the hard work of facing each other first. If they don’t fight, it’s going to make things easier for Alvarez because he’ll just take on the next lower ranked guy, someone like Lukas Konecny or Damian Jonak and have another easy title defense.

Alvarez has got an easy defense coming up on September 17th against Alfonso Gomez, who was recently given a #6 ranking by the WBC. Gomez is way out of his class against Alvarez and will lucky if he can make it to the 6th round.

Angulo hasn’t fought since stopping Joachim Alcine in the 1st round last year in July. With that much time off, Angulo will be taking a huge risk in facing a fighter as good as Martirosyan. Angulo is facing Joseph Gomez (17-4-1, 8 KO’s) on August 20th, but that guy won’t give Angulo much of a tune-up for a fight against Martirosyan.

Martirosyan looked horrible in his last fight against Saul Roman, getting knocked down in the 1st and taking a number of hard power shots during the fight. To his credit, Martirosyan came on in the 7th and scored a stoppage, but it wasn’t an impressive performance from him.