IBF super-middleweight champion Caleb Plant says he saw nothing to fear in Canelo Alvarez’s eighth-round win over Billy Joe Saunders in Texas a week ago and claims the Mexican star has been feasting on ‘UK level’ fighters.
Unified champion Canelo now owns three of the four major super-middleweight crowns and just needs to seize Plant’s IBF belt to attain undisputed status at 168lbs. That bout has been tentatively pencilled in for September 2021.
The world’s leading super-middleweights may have fallen like dominoes against Canelo but IBF king Plant insists he won’t be toppled in similar fashion. Indeed, Plant has queried the credibility of Canelo’s title wins at 168lbs with the Mexican having trumped a trio of British fighters in Callum Smith (W12), Saunders (WRTD8) and previously Rocky Fielding (WTKO3). That seems a highly uncharitable assessment, at best, with Smith and Saunders evidently world class fighters.
Nashville’s Plant believes Canelo (56-1-2, 38 KOs) has laboured whenever he has faced top US-based fighters like Floyd Mayweather (L12), Gennady Golovkin (D12, W12) and Erislandy Lara (W12).
“He’s been fighting, you know, these UK level guys, European-type guys and that’s cool. But as far as him fighting the top, Floyd, Lara, Triple-G, he’s 1-3,” a confident Plant (21-0, 12 KOs) told The Athletic.
“So, at the end of the day, he’s just a man and he’s looked human in some of these bigger fights as well.
“As far as what he did to Billy, and the fashion that he won, that scaring me or making me more nervous or anything like that, that’s not the case.”