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 alleviate him of his belt. It’s perfectly comprehensible why Sheeraz would favor to fight Canelo quite than the Cameroon-born Mbilli.
Specializing in a miracle win for Canelo is just setting themselves up for a large disappointment. The warning signs have been screaming for some time 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 briefly bursts. Mbilli isn’t 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 after which Terence Crawford, we saw an aging fighter getting physically exposed and totally dismantled.
Mbilli is a very different type of danger than a pure boxer like Bivol or Crawford, but he represents the very same threat to an old fighter: an unrelenting, punishing pace that Canelo simply cannot sustain 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.
As an alternative of treating Mbilli as an afterthought, they need to prepare Sheeraz for the very real possibility of getting to barter with him next. Banking on a fading superstar to save lots of the day is a terrible strategy when a hungry destroyer is standing right in the way in which.
Queensberry must 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.
