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Bakhram Murtazaliev says he is considering moving up to 160 pounds to challenge Erislandy Lara for her WBA middleweight title because the other two champions at 154 are busy.
IBF junior middleweight champion Murtazaliev (23-0, 17 KOs) has seemingly been frozen out by top fighters at 154, ignored and sidelined.
Too dangerous?
Bakhram’s third-round knockout of former WBO champion Tim Tszyu on October 19 may have scared off any contender or champion who had been willing to fight him before that demolition job. He’s better off staying at 154 pounds because he won’t have any better luck moving up to middleweight.
Unfortunately for Murtazaliev, it is unlikely that the 41-year-old Lara (31-3-3, 19 KOs) will agree to fight him. Lara has not fought a high-level opponent in seven years since his loss to Jarrett Hurd in 2018.
Lara has feasted on lesser fighters over the past seven years, including Danny Garcia, Michael Zerafa, Thomas Lamanna, Gary O’Sullivan, Greg Vendetti and Ramon Alvarez.
Unless someone like Turki Al-Sheikh takes notice of Murtazaliev to help him get fights, he will be stuck defending whoever his management can find in the IBF rankings. That’s good and bad.
If no good fighter wants to fight Murtazaliev, he can hold onto his IBF 154-pound title for years without losing it. But on the downside, he won’t make as much money as he could if the better-known guys were willing to fight him.
The cost of avoidance
Before beating Tszyu, Murtazaliev had been a professional for ten years, fighting little-known opponents. Despite never losing, his career went nowhere.
He wasn’t associated with any of the big promotional companies, and that hurt him. Promoters like Eddie Hearn and Top Rank would still have had a lot of trouble fighting for Murtazaliev because he would have been seen as too dangerous for other fighters to want to fight.
When you’re as good as Murtazaliev, sometimes it pays not to look as good because then you can have fights.
If both champions at 154 have found opponents, maybe move up to 160 and take Lara’s belt?
– bakhram murtazaliev (@bakhram95) January 13, 2025
