JORGE LINARES has dazzled in his two recent fights against Anthony Crolla. Now he wants to take on the biggest names available.
He has also thrown down the gauntlet for Vasyl Lomachenko to step up to a third weight class and challenge him for the WBA lightweight title.
“Lomachenko’s a really good fighter, if he ever decides to come up to 135lbs, it’s a real fight. That’s something we can look at and talk about. He’s a really good fighter and if the fight is something that happens, then we’ll be fine,” Linares told Boxing News.
There are appealing options for him already at lightweight that offer the intriguing possibility of unifying titles, or something even bigger. “We’re definitely looking at possibly [Terry] Flanagan, Mikey Garcia could be one of the biggest fights out there, maybe even Manny Pacquiao coming down to 140lbs, we can go up to 140. That’s a possibility. We going to have a training camp in the US. We’re going to be getting ready for whoever’s out there, the biggest names, only the biggest names,” he said.
Linares revealed his motivation for taking on Pacquiao – ‘lies’ about their past sparring sessions. “Manny has been running out of opponents to fight. Now we can see that he’s not having a good time fighting good fighters. He’s fought guys three or four times and also Freddie Roach mentioned Manny KO’d me in a training session, which was a lie. He never did that. If he feels that his fighter can do that to us then come down to 140 and we’ll go up to 140 and we can make a fight,” Jorge offered.
With fighters of that level of fame on the horizon, Luke Campbell’s promoter Eddie Hearn is going to have offer Linares an awful lot of money to bring him back to box in England. Linares however was deeply impressed by the Anthony Joshua-Wladimir Klitschko event at Wembley Stadium, which he did attend. On the undercard Campbell won an eliminator for Linares’ WBA title. “Even though we feel Campbell is a good fighter, we still believe he’s just a rock in the way. If the financials are there then we’ll be willing to look at all options,” he said. “Financially it needs to make sense. But it would be nice to go back to England and fight in front of 90,000 or in arena that makes sense, financially makes sense. Why not?”
Linares versus Campbell on the next Anthony Joshua undercard? That’s not a bad idea.
