Eddie Hearn: Give Dmitry Bivol his credit, don’t focus on weight for Canelo’s loss

Matchroom promoter Eddie Hearn took some time to talk to reporters about Canelo Alvarez’s unanimous decision loss to Dmitry Bivol over the weekend and whether or not that’s an indicator that he’s really just not cut out for that weight class.

On if 175 is a ‘bridge too far’ for Canelo

“It’s easy to say after it, isn’t it? But no one was saying it’s a bridge too far before. There’s a lot of people in boxing who thought this was gonna be a really tough fight, and some even picked Dmitry Bivol, but we can’t stand here now and say ‘bridge too far’ because if we would’ve had this conversation (before the fight) we would’ve said ‘oh, he’s a huge favorite,’ which he was.

“We don’t know whether it was a mixture of a little bit of tiredness from Saul, the weight — I don’t know — did he have a good camp? I don’t know. But let’s not take away from the brilliance of Dmitry Bivol. He was absolutely punch perfect. And I think coming off the Craig Richards win and coming off the Lenin Castillo win, you wouldn’t look at him necessarily and think he had a performance like that in him against the pound-for-pound No. 1.

“It’s like Saul wants to handicap himself to have the toughest challenges, and that sometimes can backfire. So now we’ll have to sit down with Eddy (Reynoso) and say ‘do we want to activate the rematch or do we want to move to ‘68 but I just can’t see him not wanting to avenge that defeat.”