Will Cleverly fight Dawson now off Hopkins

By Scott Gilfoid: WBO light heavyweight champion Nathan Cleverly had been talking about wanting to fight Bernard Hopkins win or lose after his fight against Chad Dawson was over. Cleverly later changed his tune, saying he would like to face the winner of the Dawson-Hopkins II bout in the UK. Well, here’s Cleverly’s big chance to face the winner now that Dawson did his thing and defeated old man Hopkins. So will Cleverly try and fight Dawson or will he back away and continue to fight the Tommy Karpency and Robin Krasniqi’s of the light heavyweight division? I don’t even need to guess what Cleverly will do now. I can’t see him fighting Dawson, no way. That fight won’t happen. I guess we’ll just hear a lot of silence from Cleverly on that end about a Dawson fight. Instead, we’ll likely see Cleverly get set up with a fight against little known #4 WBO contender Robin Krasniqi for a nice little mismatch so that Cleverly can hold onto his World Boxing Organization for a little while longer before the WBO one day actually forces him to fight his mandatory challenger Dmitry Sukhotsky. I wonder how many years it’ll be before Cleverly finally is pushed into fighting Sukhotsky. My guess is two or three at the minimum. I would hate to be Sukhotsky and be waiting around for ages trying to get a shot against Cleverly. I hate to even contemplate what Dawson would do to Cleverly. It would be a major slaughter with Dawson winning every round and likely taking him out. Of course, it won’t happen because I think Cleverly’s not up for the task. He wanted 47-year-old Hopkins, but that’s different. It was a safe fight because Hopkins is fading and not nearly the same threat that Dawson is. But I sure am interested to see if Cleverly will take the challenge in facing Dawson now that he came out ahead. He might as well fight Dawson, because if the goal is for Cleverly to try and make a name for himself, then Dawson is clearly the way to go. The opposite of that would be for Cleverly to continue to face guys like Karpency, Aleksy Kuziemski and Tony Bellew.