#1 WBC Tony Bellew is picking WBC light heavyweight champion Chad Dawson (31-2, 17 KO’s) to defeat the hard hitting but still largely unproven Adonis Stevenson (20-1, 17 KO’s) this Saturday night at the Bell Centre in Montreal, Canada.
Stevenson, 35, is moving up in weight from the super middleweight division to face the recently knocked out Dawson. Bellew sees Dawson as having too much talent for Stevenson to handle, but Bellew is hoping that Stevenson wins because he feels he matches up well against him.
Bellew said to Sky Ringside “You have two southpaws…[Dawson] wasn’t right at 168 and that’s the million dollar question whether Dawson will be able to come back after the loss to Andre Ward. Will he be the same? I think back at 175 he’ll put the demons away, and after he gets the first two or three rounds out of the way, Stevenson is in trouble. If I was a betting man, without a doubt it’s Dawson.”
Bellew went on to say that he’s really hoping that it’ll be Stevenson who emerges victorious in that fight because he’d like to fight him go to war. I’m not sure if that would be a good fight for Bellew, though, because he just came off of two unimpressive performances against Isaac Chilemba in back to back fights and I rate Stevenson as being a better fighter than Chilemba and a much better puncher.
The Dawson-Stevenson fight will be a tough one for Dawson because the timing of the fight is really bad with it coming right after a Dawson loss to Andre Ward last September. Dawson fought Ward at 168 instead of having him come up in weight or fighting him at a catch-weight so that Dawson wouldn’t have to drain down from 175. Dawson took a beating in that fight and was never competitive for even a small amount of time.