By Matt Stein: 37-year-old WBA/WBO lightweight champion Juan Manuel Marquez (51-5-1, 37 KO’s) will be defending his titles against one of the hardest punchers in the lightweight division in 30-year-old WBO lightweight interim champion Michael Katsidis (27-2, 22 KO’s) of Australia for a fight that will be held on November 27th at the MGM Grand, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Marquez has double the experience that Marquez has, and is clearly the better fighter as far as boxing skills go. However, Marquez is starting to show signs of slowing down and aging in his past two fights and it wouldn’t be a shock to me if Katsidis takes this fight.

As hard as Katsidis hits and as fast and powerful as he is, I can see him taking Marquez out if he jumps on him early and gets Marquez to engage with him. Marquez will probably choose to slug with Katsidis and I can see how that will hurt him in this fight.

Marquez has been hurt before by Manny Pacquiao, but Katsidis is a better finisher than Pacquiao when he has someone hurt. If he stuns Marquez, he’s going to be right on him with power shots and it’s going to take a minor miracle for him not to be knocked out in that fight. You got to give Marquez credit for taking the Marquez fight because he could have ducked him and chose a weaker fighter to try and avoid getting beaten again.

However, Marquez wanted to keep his WBO title and the best way to do that was to take on and defeat Katsidis. If Marquez can stay alive in this fight and keep landing, he may be able to puff up Katsidis’ face and cut him. Katsidis has a huge problems with getting cut in his fights, and Marquez could take advantage of that by staying in the pocket and landing power shots to the eye area of Katsidis.