Newly crowned WBO super middleweight champion Hamzah has been quite vocal about wanting to face Canelo next in a unification match, provided he defeats WBC champion Mbilli to relieve him of his belt. It’s perfectly understandable why Sheeraz would prefer to fight Canelo rather than the Cameroon-born Mbilli.
Focusing on a miracle win for Canelo is just setting themselves up for a massive disappointment. The warning signs have been screaming for a while now about Canelo being past it.
Mbilli is the worst possible matchup for an old fighter with a failing engine. He brings suffocating, non-stop physical pressure from the opening bell. Canelo has spent the last several years arguably being protected by soft matchmaking, enabling him to rest on the ropes and fight in short bursts. Mbilli is not going to let him breathe, let alone rest.
When he finally stepped outside of the careful matchmaking that he’d been doing repeatedly since 2019 against Dmitry Bivol and then Terence Crawford, we saw an aging fighter getting physically exposed and totally dismantled.
Mbilli is a completely different kind of danger than a pure boxer like Bivol or Crawford, but he represents the exact same threat to an old fighter: an unrelenting, punishing pace that Canelo simply cannot keep up with anymore. If Canelo gets thoroughly thrashed in September, that whole golden vision of a big-money UK or Riyadh mega-fight goes right out the window.
Instead of treating Mbilli as an afterthought, they should prepare Sheeraz for the very real possibility of having to negotiate with him next. Banking on a fading superstar to save the day is a terrible strategy when a hungry destroyer is standing right in the way.
Queensberry should be getting Sheeraz physically ready for a world where he has to face a relentless, peaking Mbilli to unify the division. Expecting an ancient, undersized Canelo to bail them out with a miracle win is just bad business.
Read the full article here