Sergiy Derevyanchenko vs. Daniel Jacobs purse bid postponed

Boxingnews24.com

By Allan Fox

The scheduled purse bid for Thursday for the Sergiy ‘The Technician’ Derevyanchenko vs. Daniel ‘The Miracle Man’ Jacobs fight has been postponed, according to Dan Rafael of ESPN, which could mean a good thing. If the fight gets made, he two will be battling for the vacant International Boxing Federation middleweight title that was recently stripped from IBF champion Gennady ‘GGG’ Golovkin by the sanctioning body.

It’s still unclear the Jacobs-Derevyanchenko fight will get made due to Derevyanchenko’s promoter Lou DiBella choosing to go the purse bid option rather than making a deal. DiBella wanted the fight to go to the highest bidder, but that ultimately could make the fight impossible to do if an outside promoter wins the bid and chooses to have it televised on a network like ESPN or Showtime. Jacobs (34-2, 29 KOs) is under contract with HBO, and it’s unlikely that he’ll be able to fight on another network.

If Jacobs can’t take the fight, it would be up to the IBF to decide whether they want to pick the next highest rated contender in their top 15 rankings at middleweight or if they want to just give him the belt. If the IBF insists that Derevyanchenko (12-0, 10 KOs) fights for the IBF belt, then they’ll likely order him to face #4 IBF Demetrius ‘Boo Boo’ Andrade (25-0, 16 KOs) next. It would be up to Andrade if he wants to take the fight with Derevyanchenko or not. In the past, former WBO junior middleweight champion Andrade hasn’t seemed eager to take the fight, but perhaps he’ll be ready to face him now that he’s gotten one fight under his belt at 160 against Alantez Fox.

The IBF put GGG in a tough position when they wanted him to defend against Derevyanchenko on three weeks’ notice after Saul Canelo Alvarez pulled out of his May 5th rematch with Golovkin after testing positive twice for clenbuterol. Gennady’s promoter Tom Loeffler asked the IBF for an exception for them to face Vanes Martirosyan on May 5th rather than Derevyanchenko. The IBF chose not to sanction the Golovkin-Martirosyan fight. They didn’t strip Golovkin of his IBF title, but they did mandate that he would need to defend against Derevyanchenko by August 4. That put Golovkin in a tough situation where he needed to decide whether to take the small money title defense against Derevyanchenko by the August 4 date or negotiate for the big money rematch against Canelo Alvarez for September 15.

Ultimately, Golovkin took the fight against Canelo and the IBF subsequently stripped GGG of his title with their organization. The end result is the IBF are going to wind up with a less popular champion when the dust clears. The IBF will likely end up with one of these three as their middleweight champion: Andrade, Derevyanchenko or Jacobs. If the IBF is lucky, the winner of the Golovkin vs. Canelo II fight will show interest in fighting their new IBF champion. I’m not sure that will be the case. If Derevyanchenko winds up winning the IBF title, then it’s likely that Canelo and GGG will ignore him. The reason for that is there’s no money in a fight between them and Derevyanchenko.

The 32-year-old Ukrainian fighter lacks the popularity for Canelo or Golovkin to make big money facing him. The best scenario for Canelo and Golovkin would be for the better known 31-year-old Jacobs to defeat Derevyanchenko to become the new IBF champion. However, as bad as Jacobs has looked in his last two fights against Maciej Sulecki and Luis Arias, he might not get past Derevyanchenko. That’s going to be a very tough fight for Jacobs, as Derevyanchenko is arguably a better fighter than Sulecki, and Daniel almost lost to him last April. Jacobs barely won the fight, which was televised on HBO World Championship Boxing from the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York. The fight appeared to be decided with Jacobs’ 12

th round knockdown of the 29-year-old Sulecki. The scores were quite favorable to Jacobs with the judges giving him the nod by these set of scores: 116-111, 117-110 and 115-112. Boxing News 24 scored it 115-112 for Jacobs. He barely won the fight, and likely would have lost if the junior middleweight Sulecki has more punching power. Derevyanchenko is like a slightly better version of Sulecki. The only things that Derevyanchenko doesn’t have that Sulecki possesses are youth, height, reach and a great inside game. Sulecki was pounding the stuffing out of Jacobs all night long from the inside. Derevyanchenko isn’t going to be able to duplicate his efforts on the inside because he’s nowhere near as good as the Polish fighter in close.

Jacobs lost a close 12 round unanimous decision to Gennady Golovkin last year in March in Brooklyn, New York. The fight was televised on HBO pay-per-view. Jacobs would have possibly won the fight if he’d gone after Golovkin in the first six rounds of the fight instead of waiting until the second half of the contest to start applying pressure on the shorter fighter. However, it still might have wound up going against Jacobs if he’d attacked Golovkin hard in the first six rounds, because he would have gone straight into the teeth of GGG’s offense while he was still fresh and strong. That would have meant that Jacobs would have needed to take a lot more hard head and body shots than he did, and I’m not sure that he would have been able to handle Golovkin’s power.

2008 Olympian Derevyanchenko’s resume is barren of talent for the most part. The only notable win on Derevyanchenko’s four-year pro resume is a 12th round knockout of middleweight contender Tureano Johnson in August of 2017. That was a competitive fight in which both guys took a lot of punishment. If Derevyanchenko had more hand speed, he wouldn’t have been hit as much, but unfortunately he was there to be nailed by Johnson’s power shots all night long. Derevyanchenko stayed out of the ring for seven months after that punishing fight against Johnson. Last March, Derevyanchenko finally retired to the ring and stopped journeyman Dashon Johnson (22-23-3, 7 KOs) in the 6th round. Derevyanchenko took a lot of heat for him facing a journeyman with a 22-23 record in Johnson, as the boxing public expects a lot more from fighters with No.1 rankings. Derevynachenko is pretty old at 32 to be still fighting journeyman level opposition. He should have continued fighting contenders after his win over Tureano Johnson rather than going back to the journeyman circuit to pick out his opponent.

Jacobs doesn’t need to fight Derevyanchenko for him to get a title shot. Jacobs’ win over Sulecki made him the World Boxing Association mandatory challenger, so he doesn’t need to fight for the IBF belt if he doesn’t want to. However, given that Jacobs is signed with HBO, it’s in his best interest to fight the best possible opponents every time out rather than facing fodder and bringing in poor ratings for the network. The name of the game for fighters is to be involved in exciting fights against the best possible opponents if they want to continue fighting on a network like HBO. Facing dreadfully poor opposition will ensure that Jacobs keeps winning, but it will also likely result in poor ratings and HBO choosing not to extend his contract with their network when it soon expires.

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