Linares vs. Campbell: Luke okay with being underdog

Boxingnews24.com

By Scott Gilfoid: #1 WBA Luke Campbell (17-1, 14 KOs) is okay with being the underdog for his title shot this Saturday night against WBA World lightweight champion (42-3, 27 KOs) on HBO Championship Boxing at The Forum in Inglewood, California.

Campbell, 29, says he’s always been an underdog in the past for his biggest fights when he was fighting in the amateur ranks. It’s a bit different now that Campbell is no longer fighting as an amateur. The pros are a heck of a lot better, and the fights are longer than the 3 and 4 round affairs that he lanky 5’9” Campbell had during his amateur days. There’s more of an emphasis on body punching in the problems, and that makes it a lot different.

“If you look back most of my career in the amateurs, I’ve always been the underdog,”Campbell said to skysports.com.

Campbell is well-connected with him being promoted by Eddie Hearn’s Matchroom Sport promotional company. You can argue that Campbell hasn’t beaten anyone near good enough to be rated at No.1 by the World Boxing Association. Campbell lost to Yvan Mendy by a 12-round split decision on December 12, 2015, and since then he’s won his last 5 fights beating this group of fighters: Darleys Perez, Jairo Lopez, Derry Mathews, Argenis Mendez and Gary Sykes.

Campbell was being fast tracked by the WBC to fight against their champion Mikey Garcia, but instead Hearn, the sly fox, positioned Campbell to go after the 32-year-old Linares instead. What does that move suggest? It tells me that Hearn might not have liked Campbell’s chances of beating a talent like Mikey Garcia, so instead he positioned him against the sometimes-vulnerable Linares. It’s still a huge ask for Campbell to beat Linares, as he’s a very talented and highly technical lightweight. This isn’t Gary Sykes, Mathews, Mendez, Lopez or Perez that Campbell will be facing. Linares is an old pro with 15 years of experience as a pro. Linares has been around for a long, long time, and he’s got loads of talent and he’s coming off back to back victories over Anthony Crolla.

For the first time in his 4-year pro career, Campbell will be fighting away from the safe confines of the UK. This is going to make it tough for Campbell. He’s been fighting in front of friendly UK audiences even when he won his gold medal in the 2012 Olympics in London, England. Like Anthony Joshua, Campbell was a controversial gold medalist in the 2012 Olympics after winning 3 HIGHLY questionable victories over John Joe Nevin (Ireland), Detelin Dalakiev (Bulgaria) and Vitorio Parrinello (Italy). You can argue that the outcome might have been different for Campbell if those fights didn’t take place in front of friendly audiences in the UK. Boxing News 24 had Campbell losing all 3 of those fights. Campbell looked good, but not as good as the guys that he won controversial decisions against in that Olympics.

Campbell has trouble against taller fighters with pop in their punches. Yvan Mendy, 5’8 ½”, knocked Campbell down in the 5th round, and dominated the entire fight. Surprisingly, one judge, John Keane from the UK, scored it in Campbell’s favor by a 115-113 score. That score was as bad as last Saturday night’s 118-110 score from judge Adalaide Byrd for Saul “Canelo” Alvarez over middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin. At best, Campbell deserved to win 2 rounds in the fight. I don’t know where Keane was coming from in giving Campbell the victory, but it’s a good thing there were 2 other judges on hand to overrule that decision. If this was a fight in which the referee did the scoring, Mendy would have been out of luck. It’s interesting though that Hearn hasn’t put Campbell back inside the ring with Mendy in a rematch so he could try to avenge the loss. It’s very unusual for Olympic gold medalists not to at least try and get revenge for their defeats. We saw Lennox Lewis avenge his defeat at the hands of Hasim Rahman. It just makes you wonder whether there was confidence issue that kept Campbell or Hearn from making the Mendy rematch. Did they not fancy their chances in a second fight against Mendy? It’s the moves that fighters choose not to take that tell you something about them. I smell fear.

He’s got a good chance of beating Linares,” heavyweight world champion Anthony Joshua said to skysports.com. ”He’s definitely got the capability of beating Jorge Linares. Linares is phenomenal, and still is. But I look at the time that Kevin Mitchell fought him – he was doing well until he cut his eye,” said Joshua.

I’m not sure what Joshua is talking about in saying that Mitchell was doing well until he got a cut eye in his 10-th round knockout loss to Linares on May 30, 2015. I saw that fight, and Mitchell was getting schooled from the early rounds. The fight took place in London, England at the O2 Arena in front of a large pro-Mitchell crowd. In the 5th round, Mitchell hit Linares with an elbow to the head and knocked him down. The referee blew the call in scoring it as a knockdown. It was painfully obvious from watching the knockdown at normal speed that Mitchell had clobbered Linares with a textbook elbow to the head. Sure enough, in slow motion you could see Mitchell hitting Linares with a lead elbow, causing him to fall. Other than that bogus knockdown in the 5th, the fight belonged to Linares from start to finish. It just shows you what visiting fighters like Linares are up against when they walk into the lion’s den of a guy from another country. Campbell is not going to be fighting at home. All the cheering from Campbell’s loyal boxing fans in the UK won’t be heard on Saturday night in Inglewood. If Campbell is going to have to win this fight, he’s going to need to be self-motivated rather than feeding off the adrenalin from the crowd like he’d done in the past. It’s going to be a completely different story for Campbell when he gets out there against the talented Linares.

”His punches came so quickly they were all good, but he stabs the body well, really well,” said former Linares victim Anthony Crolla to skysports.com about Linares’ shots. ”Going downstairs to the body, he landed it throughout the fight and it wasn’t like a shot that hurt but it just accumulated throughout the fight,” said Crolla.

Crolla did reasonably well in the first fight against Linares when he was dealing with a bad hand injury on September 24, 2016. Linares was still able to beat Crolla convincingly even with a hand problem that kept him from being 100%. In the rematch on March 25, Linares totally schooled Crolla in besting him by a lopsided 12 ound unanimous decision by he scores 118-109, 118-109 and 118-109. I had Linares beating Crolla by 11 rounds to 1 score. It was all Crolla could do to win 1 round on my scorecard. He was so badly outclassed against the more talented Linares.

The only real chance I see for Campbell is if Linares comes into the fight with a hand injury that he doesn’t disclose to the medical staff. If Linares fights with a hand injury for the entire 12 round fight, then I can see him losing to Campbell. Linares isn’t going to be able to beat a fighter like Campbell with just 1 hand like he did against Crolla. Campbell is a better fighter than Crolla in my estimation. I don’t see Campbell as being as good as Mendy, Mikey Garcia, Dejan Zlaticanin, Raymundo Beltran, Robert Easter Jr., Javier Fortuna, Roman Andreev or Terry Flanagan, but he’s still a good basic fighter with size and power. Campbell’s southpaw stance is what makes him so difficult to beat. Linares will need to be on his job on Saturday for him to beat Campbell.