Cleverly-Hopkins fight likely won’t happen due to Dawson beating Hopkins on April 28th

By Boxing News - 04/02/2012 - Comments

Image: Cleverly-Hopkins fight likely won't happen due to Dawson beating Hopkins on April 28thBy Dan Ambrose: It seems that WBO light heavyweight champion Nathan Cleverly’s promoter is getting way ahead of himself with talking about a unification bout between Cleverly and WBC light heavyweight champion Bernard Hopkins for the summer in Wales. Even Hopkins’ promote Richard Schaefer is talking about the fight possibly taking place.

However, it’s not going to happen because Hopkins has a fight scheduled against Chad Dawson on April 28th and Hopkins will not win that fight. The only way I can see Hopkins dodging a loss in that bout is for him to get injured again and hope that the New Jersey Athletic Commission and the World Boxing Council rule the fight as another no contest like Hopkins’ last fight against Dawson when Hopkins suffered a shoulder injury in the 2nd round after being dropped on the canvas by an annoyed Dawson.

Right now there’s a bit of confusion about a Hopkins-Cleverly fight. On one hand they’re saying that Hopkins has to beat Dawson to get the fight against Cleverly, but on the other there’s talk that Cleverly still wants to fight Hopkins even if Hopkins losses to Dawson. I’m not sure if Cleverly is aware of this or not but that’s going to make him look really, really bad if he takes on the loser of Hopkins-Dawson. It’ll make Cleverly look like a cherry picker, someone that looks for easy fights against beatable opposition instead of taking on the best opponents.

There are already a lot of dissatisfied boxing fans with Cleverly due to him choosing to bypass his number #1 mandatory challenger the hard hitting Dmitriy Sukhotsky in order to fight a much lighter hitting and inexperienced Robin Krasniqi on April 28th. Cleverly’s promoter went to bat to get Krasniqi as the opponent for Cleverly after the WBO said no to a Krasniqi-Cleverly fight, telling Cleverly’s promoter that Cleverly needs to finally face his mandatory challenger Sukhotsky. However, Cleverly’s promoter was able to convince the WBO to let Cleverly fight Krasniqi rather than Sukhotsky. As of now, who knows when Cleverly will finally defend his title against his mandatory.



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