Edison Miranda to get another title shot against Robert Stieglitz

According to European fight reporter extraordinaire Per Ake Persson, Robert Stieglitz is set to make the first defense of his super middleweight title against dangerous slugger Edison Miranda.  The fight will take place on January 9 in Germany, and will be televised in Germany on ZDF.

Miranda is a solid B-level fighter, and in retrospect, none of his losses look particularly bad.  In his first loss, he fought a very close fight with Arthur Abraham where a lot of folks thought he was robbed of a knockout victory due to poor refereeing.  In his other three losses, he was dominated, but all of the losses were to top guys.  Kelly Pavlik laid out the gameplan to beat Miranda, beating him to the punch and outworking him with hard shots until he was TKOed.  After that, Arthur Abraham followed the same gameplan in a rematch where Miranda unsurprisingly won the first couple rounds before Abraham turned on the gas and knocked him out.  Most recently, Miranda lost a wide decision to Andre Ward, which doesn't look too bad after the way Ward dominated Mikkel Kessler.  He does also hold good wins over Allan Green and Howard Eastman. More recently, Miranda has been retooling, picking up a new trainer and a new promoter.

Stieglitz is a bit of a middling fighter who works hard and comes to fight, but who has fairly average talent.  He recently won the belt against Karoly Balzsay in a fight where Balzsay was leading at the point where his stamina failed him, and Stieglitz was able to score a TKO on the hapless Hungarian in the late rounds.  Before that, his best win was against Alejandro Berrio via controversial stoppage, although Berrio was able to score a knockout in the rematch.  Librado Andrade also faced Stieglitz in a fight where Andrade dominated, despite Stieglitz's best efforts.  However, Stieglitz appears to have visibly improved since that loss.

Let's just hope this one gets picked up by a network.  Both guys fight an offensive style, like to supply knockouts and have mediocre chins.  Someone will get knocked out in this one, and it will probably be an entertaining fight up to the point of that knockout.  Also, whoever wins this fight puts himself near the top of top of the list to face the Bute-Andrade winner, as they too were left out of the Super Six Tournament.  Frankly, a mini unification tournament between these four, who are all top 15 super middleweights, doesn't sound half bad.