WHILE reading last week’s Boxing News I had the feeling that even though Kell Brook was IBF world champion he was envious of Amir Khan and I can see why.
Kell wants to fight Khan because he expects it to be (and rightly so) a big money fight but I would like to see him fight Brandon Rios – more on him in a bit – after his next defence. Khan is in exciting fights, and even if they are not gung-ho you are always on the edge of your seat wondering if his chin will stand up, whereas with Kell you tend to watch his fights because he is British and you want the Brit to win. If Brook is successful in his next defence and then take out someone like Rios then he has arrived, and is ready for Khan, but I wouldn’t expect another 80,000 to turn up to a football stadium to watch it. It just isn’t a Carl Froch-George Groves fight.
Only one fight to whet the appetite this weekend and that was Rios against Mike Alvarado in their third fight of the trilogy and boy was I glad I watched it. Rios looked the business I thought Alvarado held his own for the first minute-and-a-half of the fight and that was it, Rios went to work on him. In the second round, Rios was ripping him apart and just when it looked like Alvarado was going to go, he hurled a belter well south of the border, which gave him a welcome respite and time to gather himself. To my mind it was a great piece of gamesmanship as the old pros know how to survive but, alas, it only postponed the inevitable. Out they came for the third round and Rios hit Alvarado with everything in a controlled constant attack of hooks, uppercuts, jabs, everything hitting Brandon and in the end he went down for a count and the writing was on the wall. Although he managed to see the round out he needed a week to get over the punishment that he had taken, not the allocated 60 seconds, and his corner quite rightly pulled him out of the fight.
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