Quote Originally Posted by Bilbo
I was looking in the BBC Sport forums and the general consensus is that Skelton is going to get annihilated.

I'm really not so sure. I'm actually considering a bold bet in the prediction comp on him upsetting Chagaev.

Everyone seems to be rating Skelton based on his one bad performance against Michael Sprott.

But that was probably his worst ever performance and he still won easiliy, apart from one blind judge anyways.

Chagaev beat Valuev fair enough but his record apart from that is hardly a stellar one.

Scraping a win over John Ruiz can hardly be considered as an argument for 'greatness'.

He struggled with Vladimir Virchis too.

Skelton imo is still unbeaten, the judges robbed him in the first Williams fight and he responded by dancing around him and winning virtually all the rounds in the rematch.

I don't actually see anyone better than Williams on Chagaev's record, unless you count Valuev and Ruiz

When you add in that Skelton will likely outweigh his opponent by at least 20 lbs I think the rough house, brawling tactics of Skelton could really mess up Chagaev's gameplan.

I think Chagaev is the justifiable favourite but I really think Skelton has a live chance in this bout.

I'd say it's 60/40 in Chagaev's favour.

Chagaev didn't scrape a win over Ruiz,but just won convincingly IMO...If Skelton had a blind judge against Sprott then the same goes for Chagaev-Ruiz meaning it should have been UD for Ruslan...

And yeah he struggled with Virchis as much as Virchis struggled with Chagaev...this was an incredible
boring fight with no fighter really trying anything...should have been a draw...

But he got a convincing (t)ko over Sprott,which you didn't mentioned...And considering that Skelton
apparently(I haven't seen the fight) struggled with Sprott thats a good thing...


I say Chagaev by decision or late ko...