(Photo Credit: Amanda Kwok / SHOWTIME) WBA/WBC light welterweight champion Danny Garcia (28-0, 16 KOs) will be meeting Rod Salka (19-3, 3 KOs) tonight on Showtime from the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.
While Garcia has received a lot of negative comments by fans for fighting a lightweight in Salka instead of a highly ranked light welterweight, Stephen Espinoza of Showtime Sports, vouches for Salka that he’s going to make it an entertaining fight from start to finish.
Espinoza saw Salka’s last two fights against Alexei Collado and Ricardo Alvarez, and he came away impressed with what he saw from him. Espinoza thinks that Salka deserved to get a decision in the Alvarez fight.
“He [Salka] has the same style that Danny had problems with last March [against Mauricio Herrera],” Espinoza said. “One thing about Salka, he’s going to come and fight. He’s an active fighter, a busy fighter, and I’m confident it’s going to be an entertaining fight,” Espinoza said.
If the idea is to have a little brawler come in and give it his all like a short fireworks display, then Salka is definitely the guy for the fight. It’ll be interesting for casual boxing fans who don’t follow the sport and are just looking for entertainment between two fighters trading power shots back and forth for 12 rounds. But if you’re a hardcore fan looking for an opponent with a real chance of beating Garcia, then this fight isn’t going to be the one for you. Salka is too small, too weak and too slow to have a chance of beating Garcia.
The best that you can hope for from Salka is that he’ll go out on his shield tonight. The fact that Salka will be losing tonight is pretty much academic at this point. The only thing we don’t know is how he’s going to lose.
For Garcia’s sake, he needs to score a knockout against Salka to make boxing fans forget about the robbery that took place in his last fight against Herrera when he was given a victory over him that the boxing world saw him losing last March in Puerto Rico. But if Garcia wins another controversial decision like the Herrera fight, then he’s going to need to backtrack and start fighting these guys a second time in order to save him from losing any more fans. Getting gift decisions and then moving on, while saying you easily won, is going to lose what’s left of Garcia’s remaining fans.