The strongest rumours seemed to suggest that Canelo Alvarez would be defending his WBC title against the current WBA "regular" champion Austin Trout. The Trout v Alvarez bout seemed on paper to make plenty of sense with it being a unification between two top 10 Light Middleweights. Sadly earlier this evening the WBC nixed the bout in the bud with a statement reading:
“We do not accept unification, because if we agree we would be losing authority. We are not going to take away the exclusivity because we own the WBC brand."
Seems funny that just a week prior to this statement the WBC and WBA had a unification bout down at Minimumweight between Kazuto Ioka and Akira Yeagashi with Ioka unifying those to title belts. In the past unification bouts have been seen by boxing fans as "the holy grail" or bouts even more so when both fighters are generally regarded as top 10 fighters in their division.
The WBC had yet more surprises for us. Not only had they prevented a very promising unification bout between two youngsters but presumably they had also ruled out Cornelius Bundrage (the current IBF champion)-as long as he defeats Cory Spinks this coming weekend. They also pushed 3 possible names, one is James Kirkland-a fighter who has recently suffered and injury and will likely still be recovering by the mooted date of the Canelo bout, one is Carlos Molina-a fighter that would test Canelo in ways he's never been tested, a genuinely good fight and 36 year old Acelino Freitas.
Freitas, a former champion down at Super Featherweight (130lbs) and Lightweight (135) retired in 2007 following a stoppage loss Juan Diaz though recently returned from his retirement to stop countryman Michael Oliveira. The win over the unproven Oliveira has some how earned Freitas a #15 ranking at Light Middleweight by the WBC, a ranking that enables him to challenge Canelo for the world title.
Whilst Freitas was once an excellent fighter he is no Light Middleweight and the folk at the WBC need to take a long hard look at themselves here for trying to feed Canelo a faded and much smaller Brazilian. Sadly however the idea of a Freitas v Canelo fight does rather sum up Canelo's uninspiring reign as a world champion which has seen him generally defending against Welterweights (147lbs) such as Alfonso Gomez, Shane Mosley and Kermit Cintron as well as winning the then vacant title in a bout against Matthew Hatton.
Don't be shocked if the WBC manage to confuse us all over the coming weeks until an opponent for Alvarez is eventually named.