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Friday, October 5
FOX Sports 2 (Australia), 5:00 am EDT, Blake Caparello vs Aaron Pryor Jr, Serge Yannick vs Nader Hamdan. Caparello (13-0-1, 6 KO) is a 26-year-old light heavyweight prospect, and you probably know at least a little about Pryor (16-6, 11 KO), who is super tall and fights like a converted basketball player, which is what he is far ahead of being the Jr of the great Aaron Pryor, at least in boxing terms. Pryor generally gives a decent effort, but he's dropped three straight and that could easily be five if the judges hadn't gone his way against Librado Andrade. But he has been facing legit competition, too. Yannick is coming off of a loss to Thomas Oosthuizen, while Hamdan is a 38-year-old veteran of the Aussie rings who isn't really a contender anymore, but still decent for domestic level.
Eurosport 2 (UK), 3:00 pm EDT, Wayne Alwan-Arab vs Beka Sutidze.
Saturday, October 6
BoxNation (UK), 2:00 pm EDT, Zaurbek Baysangurov vs Lukas Konecny. Don't sleep on this one - in fact, join us here in the afternoon, because this really has potential to be a banger of a fight, and since it is in fact a world title fight (Baysangurov holds the WBO middleweight belt) and does have legitimate chance to be terrific action, this will be our afternoon coverage rather than the Prizefighter on Sky. The undercard here is typically filled with mismatches, stay-busy fights, and prospects in soft, so we'll probably talk about the Sky show until the main event comes on, but this will be the focus on Saturday. Bad Left Hook will have round-by-round coverage.
Sky Sports 1 (UK), 3:30 pm EDT, Rocky Fielding vs Carl Dilks, Prizefighter: Lightweights. Fielding actually won a very good super middleweight Prizefighter tournament back in March 2011, and then his momentum was kinda-squandered, and kinda he just wasn't ready to do a lot more, either, to be honest. He's gone 5-0 since, knocking off weak opponents mostly, and veteran Dilks is a step up for him. It's a solid fight for where Fielding is at. The Prizefighter field is a pretty good one. Anthony Crolla (23-3, 9 KO) and Derry Mathews (30-7-1, 16 KO) headline the field, with the hope that they'll rematch after their barnburner in April, which was Crolla's last fight. Mathews came back and lost another good fight to Gavin Rees in July. Gary Sykes (20-2, 5 KO) is the other main name in the tournament, so if you still weren't sure, I hope this really says enough about what kind of absolutely awful matchmaking Golden Boy and Haymon were giving Adrien Broner for the 5/19 Khan-Peterson undercard that fell through, and how absurd it was that HBO signed off on that. Terry Flannigan, Stephen Jennings, Patrick Walsh, Jamie Spence, and Tommy Coyle round out the field.
TyC Sports (Argentina), 8:00 pm EDT, Yesica Patricia Marcos vs Dayana Cordero.
PPV ($39.95), 9:00 pm EDT, Wilfredo Vazquez Jr vs Jonathan Oquendo, Moises Fuentes vs Ivan Calderon, Jose A. Gonzalez vs Humberto Toledo, Victor Bisbal vs Alex Gonzales. I cannot justify paying $40 for this when there are cards of entirely comparable quality on my TV for free, so if you were just dying to know exactly how Vazquez Jr gets back on track with a win over a mid-level opponent this Saturday night, and you needed to know RIGHT EXACTLY THEN, I have to apologize, but I can't help. Maybe if Calderon hadn't slipped to the point I consider him a rather serious underdog against Fuentes, I'd be considering it a bit more, but it just ain't worth it.
Televisa (Mexico), 10:00 pm EDT, Jesus Silvestre vs Takuya Miyamura, Susie Ramadan vs Yazmin Rivas, Janeth Perez vs Tenkai Tsunami.
FOX Sports, 10:30 pm EDT, Jorge Linares vs Hector Velazquez, Yoshihiro Kamegai vs Jorge Silva. This is the card we'll be covering live on Saturday night, with Linares trying to bounce back from two straight losses and Kamegai, a welterweight prospect, back in the States for a second time. Both are in should-win fights for sure (Velazquez's stock even as a gatekeeper has dropped), but with Linares you never know, and Kamegai is up against a 20-year-old foe who has a couple of losses but, well, is 20, so who knows what his upside could wind up being? Bad Left Hook will have live round-by-round coverage.
TV Azteca (Mexico), 10:30 pm EDT, Kompayak Porpramook vs Adrian Hernandez II. These two engaged in a serious contender for 2011 Fight of the Year, which was such a good fight it might actually have won a few of those awards if it hadn't taken place on December 23, with most people probably not even seeing it until January, if ever. But if you missed that one, look it up. It was phenomenal. Since then, Hernandez is 2-0 against scrubs, and Kompayak is 2-0 against Jonathan Taconing in a controversial fight, and some guy who doesn't even have a name and is listed by BoxRec as "Manoj ?."