When Billy Joe Saunders’s defense of his WBO middleweight belt against Avtandil Khurtsidze fell through due to Khurtsidze’s alleged criminal activities, Saunders found himself in need of a new opponent. Today he found one in former title challenger Willie Monroe Jr.
Willie Monroe (21-2, 6 KOs) is by my estimation a live underdog here, albeit not a particularly exciting one. Monroe has shown himself capable of brief flashes of counter punching brilliance, but all too often his main goal seems to be to minimize the action. In 2015 he was stopped by Gennady Golovkin in six and most recently, last September, Willie Monroe was able to fairly easily outpoint Gabriel Rosado.
Billy Joe Saunders (24-0, 12 KOs) has had a well documented, extremely lackluster title reign. In December of 2015, the British titleholder won his belt in a very tedious affair against Andy Lee. Then, one year later, he defended it in December of 2016 against almost completely unknown Artur Afakov in a fight in which Saunders definitely struggled a bit. Otherwise, nothing. It will almost have been two years since Saunders won his belt when this fight starts and that is all he has to show for it.
Willie Monroe is better than Artur Afako, at least, and considerably so to my eyes. This makes a Monroe victory a potentially viable outcome, but I do not like this style matchup in terms of the watchability of the fight itself. Saunders is not exactly an action fighter so this could get quite ugly in the ring. The fight with Avtandil Khurtsidze would have been almost guaranteed to have been a good action fight, but the Georgian’s organized crime related chargers put a stop to that.
