Calzaghe-Manfredo then Cotto-Gomez

[SweetPea]

you're comparing two different things though.. Cotto is not 35 and trying to cement his legacy by defeating the best available.. Granted, Cotto is a champ, and should be fighting higher caliber fighters, but after just fighting mosley, etc.. you can't say that he's turning anyone down.

This is exactly right.

Cotto is 27 and coming off of the two biggest wins of his career. Calzaghe was in his mid-30s and coming off of a win over a complete journeyman like Sakio Bika.

Also, we already knew going into this fight that Cotto was going to be fighting the Cintron/Margarito winner next (in other words.... another tough fight). We didn't know for sure at the time of Calzaghe-Manfredo that Calzaghe would be fighting Kessler next, it wasn't agreed to yet.

[OumaFan]

SweetPea and RP33 beat me to it, the annoying thing about Manfredo was it came right after Bika. I don't have a problem with a soft fight here and there in between big fights which is what this was, a tune up total mismatch type of fight. Although in the end Calzaghe has come through with Kessler and Hopkins.

And there were people saying Gomez was in for a horrible beating, less people than I would have imagined but still it wasn't like everybody thought it was going to be a good fight.

[Preme]

i defended Joe for the manfredo fight and still do, i still believe it was the right choice then to get into the american picture, look how it ended up a massive interest in the kessler fight form all over the world and now hopkins

BUT

You can understand why he got slack for and why Gomez was considered a decent test for cotto. I doubt there were many if any who realy thought Gomez would win, but he was a big lad, down from middle done a number on a (shot) gatti... it was a decent pick for cotto since most other names were busy.