Trainer Stephen Edwards thinks Errol Spence Jr., the A-side, shouldn’t have waited so long to make the fight with Terence Crawford because he was already big for the welterweight division to begin with.
Edwards feels that Spence (28-1, 22 KOs) should have made the fight in 2017 or 2018 rather than waiting until 2023 when he was struggling with the weight to get down to 147.
Spence paid a heavy price with his decision to delay the fight, as he was stopped in the ninth round and took a bad beating at the hands of Crawford last July on Showtime PPV.
Edwards fails to point out that the way Spence looked in that fight, he would have lost to many of the top 147 & 140-lb fighters. That’s not taking credit away from Crawford, but the reality is that Spence looked drained and not the guy that he once was.
Crawford (40-0, 31 KOs) got the biggest win of his 15-year professional career, and he’s now hoping to use the victory to wrangle a fight with Canelo Alvarez, which doesn’t seem realistic right now unless someone comes up with a load of dough that makes it worthwhile for the Mexican star.
If the Saudis want to put their money into a fight that the boxing world would want to watch in high numbers, the Canelo vs. Crawford fight would give them a better return on their investment than wasting money on Tyson Fury fights.
“Errol Spence, I hate the way the media has turned on him, and saying so many negative things about him. I don’t want to talk about whether he was the same or not. Obviously, it looked like something was a little off if we’re honest, but maybe that was just Crawford,” said Stephen Edwards to Fighthype about Spence’s loss to Terence Crawford last July.
“The fight before that, Errol looked great against [Yordenis] Ugas. He looked great. Because of how great he looked against Ugas, he made this fight closer in terms of who everyone thought was going to win because that was his [Spence’s] first super good performance in years,” said Edwards,
Spence did NOT look good against Yordenis Ugas last year, as he was hurt and took more punishment in that fight than he’d taken his entire career. The Ugas fight showed that Spence wasn’t the same fighter that once was and that was only a matter of time before he was beaten.
Ugas was easily handled in his last fight by Mario Barrios, who did a much better job of beating him than Spence did.
“I don’t know if it was the weight or whatever. If it was, it was a shame. All I can say is that’s one of the reasons why it’s not good to wait fights out. They’ve both been champions since 2017 and 2018,” said Edwards.
“So when one guy is a little bit bigger, you got to make the fight when you’re more comfortable to make the weight. That’s just the reality behind it.”
Edwards is right about it being better for Spence to have taken the fight with Crawford years ago instead of waiting until he could no longer make the 147-lb limit to finally face him. What a mistake.
“You make the fight when you can’t make the weight, then I don’t think you can use that as an excuse with Errol being the A-side because the A-side has more control over when the fight gets made,” said Edwards. “So, I don’t want to talk about the weight, to be honest, because that’s a discredit to Crawford.
“He showed up for the biggest fight of his life and put on an all-time great performance. If Errol was compromised, he’s not making any excuses for himself, so we can’t make no excuses for him. We just got to just go by what our eyes told us,” said Edwards.
The only way that’ll know if it wasn’t weight that led to Spence’s loss is if the rematch takes place at 154 and he doesn’t resemble the undead puppet, ‘Crypt Keeper’ from the Tales from the Crypt television series. If Spence is still drained at 154, that’s a wrap for him because he probably doesn’t have the ability to move up to 160 or 168 to reinvent himself.
“It’s a shame because history is what it is. The result is never going to change. It’s just how it is,” said Edwards.
