Rigondeaux can win his first world title - and it's live on UK TV
Cuban hot-shot Guillermo Rigondeaux returns to the ring on Friday January 20th following a spell of inactivity that has now nearly spanned a full year.
‘El Chacal’ was last seen in Dublin’s City West venue, pounding Limerick’s Willie Casey into a quick fire defeat and thus successfully defending his WBA interim super-bantamweight crown.
Rigondeaux will now step up and fight for the WBA title proper (if anything is ever ‘proper’ when the WBA are involved) in the Palms Casino Resort, Las Vegas against champion Rico Ramos - a potential cracker that will be shown live in the UK on Premier Sports.
Even though illustrious names like Nonito Donaire and Yuriorkis Gamboa were being mentioned after the Casey win, it is little-known American Ramos who has been handed the unenviable task of derailing the Cuban freight train.
Ramos owns the actual WBA belt after impressively coming from behind (he was way down on all three scorecards) to halt decent Japanese boxer Akifumi Shimoda in the seventh round of their title encounter back in July 2011.
Ramos, now 20-0 (11 KOs), has not fought since then, so he will also have some rust to shed in the opening rounds of this championship bout.
Rigondeaux’s amateur pedigree hardly needs repeating, but the 31-year-old claimed a gold medal at two Olympic Games and forged a genuinely formidable reputation in the unpaid code. Now being handled by Cork businessman Gary Hyde and matched by promotional powerhouses Top Rank, this fight will find plenty of airtime, through Showtime in the US, Premier Sports in the UK and Setanta Sports across Ireland.
Rigondeaux showed the first glimpses of possible vulnerabilities in the fight before Casey when he negotiated 12 rounds against Panamanian Ricardo Cordoba, the man whose fight with Bernard Dunne in 2009 has since reached the realms of Irish boxing folklore. In his own personal battle with Cordoba, Rigondeaux decked his man in the fourth round but was himself placed on the canvas in round six and facing the first thing even resembling a crisis in his fledgling professional venture.
On the other hand, as his own undefeated ledger would suggest, Ramos clearly has something about him and will provide Guillermo with the test he no doubt craves. Tall, rangy and calculated in his approach, Ramos will be wary of meeting Rigondeaux head on and offering him the targets and clear openings needed for Guillermo’s razor sharp combinations to land.
Even though Ramos looks more of a test - on paper at least - ultimately Rico will most likely find himself wearing down as the fight moves towards the latter stages. My tip is for Rigondeaux to record a mid to late round stoppage win and therefore claim his first piece of professional silverware.
