The junior lightweight titleholder will headline on DAZN on February 9th.
Power punching Puerto Rican titleholder Alberto Machado (21-0, 17 KOs) will make an attempt to make his third successful defense of his WBA junior lightweight title on February 9th against recent Golden Boy signee Andrew Cancio (19-4, 14 KOs). The fight will reportedly main event a Golden Boy on DAZN card from Indio, California.
Machado, 28, first won his belt in a mild upset over Jezreel Corrales in late 2017. The power puncher looked clumsy early in that fight and was outboxed early, but he rallied behind his big power to force a come from behind stoppage and claim his first belt in a fun to watch HBO contest. His two defenses have been weak since then though, unfortunately. 2018 saw the titleholder first widely outpoint completely unknown Ghanaian challenger Rafael Mensah before quickly thrashing busted former prospect Yuandale Evans in October. Neither man was a worthy world title challenger, but such is modern boxing sometimes.
Is Andrew Cancio an improvement? Mildly, but that isn’t saying much. The 30 year old California is a underrated fringe contender in his own right with wins over Rocky Juarez, Jerry Belmontes, and Rene Alvarado. He has never beaten a top contender though and was thoroughly dominated by JoJo Diaz down at featherweight just three fights ago. Two lower level wins in 2018 is all it took to get him a title shot for some reason. Cancio is an improvement in the sense that I think he’d beat Machado’s last two challengers in Mensah and Evans, but he still doesn’t belong on this sort of stage.
Hopefully Golden Boy has better for DAZN coming in 2018 than this. The silver lining here is that the Puerto Rican titleholder is pretty crude in there. I could see him randomly having a good fight with perceived lesser talents like Cancio pretty easily.
