WBO welterweight champion Jeff Horn is not a happy camper after learning of challenger Terence ‘Bud’ Crawford pulling out of their April 14th fight due to a hand injury. The Horn-Crawford fight is being talked about being postponed until May 19th on ESPN at the Mandalay Bay Casino in Las Vegas.
Horn, 29, thinks Crawford should have stuck it out and fought him with just one good hand. His team believes Crawford beats Horn with ease. Horn thinks they should test that theory by letting Crawford fight him one-handed.
“Crawford’s supporters reckon he’s so good that he could beat me with one hand,” Horn said to Grantlee Kieza at couriermail. “Well why doesn’t he give it a go, then?”
Crawford obviously doesn’t want to take the risk of fighting with an injury, and his promoters at Top Rank aren’t about to let him take that risk. Top Rank wants to turn Crawford into their next PPV star, because right now they don’t have a replacement for Manny Pacquiao as the companies’ next money guy. Crawford needs to shine each time he fights, and he can’t do that with just one good hand.
Crawford is moving up in weight from 140, and there’s a lot of differing opinions about whether he’ll be able to excel in the new weight class. Most of Crawford’s wins at 140 were against beatable opposition like Dierry Jean, Julius Indongo, Thomas Dulorme, Felix Diaz and Ricky Burns. Those are all fighters that the top welterweights would beat with ease, and perhaps even better than Crawford did. Fighting in the light welterweight division, Crawford was rehydrating to close to 160. He had the size advantage over his opponents. At welterweight, Crawford will now be fighting guys his own size, and presumably he’ll be fighting much better opposition if Top Rank is able to work with the other promoters to make fights for him. If Crawford is only matched against Top Rank fighters, then his opposition will stay the same pretty much as it was when he was at 140. The boxing fans won’t know how good Crawford is until he finally starts getting matched against good fighters.
“This is very frustrating because I’ve been training really hard and it means I have to go through it all again,” Horn said. “It disturbs my preparation for another eight to ten weeks. The fight is the fun part. It’s the training and the dieting that I really dread!”
There’s not much Horn can do about Crawford’s injury postponement. He’s just to hit the reset button on his training camp and hope the injury for Crawford doesn’t turn out to be a chronic thing.