Bakhram Murtazaliev staring down Erislandy Lara, but will the fight happen?

Bakhram Murtazaliev says he is considering moving up to 160 pounds to challenge Erislandy Lara for his WBA middleweight title because the other two champions at 154 are busy.

IBF junior middleweight champion Murtazaliev (23-0, 17 KOs) seems to have been frozen out by the top fighters at 154, ignored and sidetracked.

Too dangerous?

Bakhram’s third-round knockout of former WBO champion Tim Tszyu on Oct. 19 may have scared away any contender or champion who would have been willing to fight him before that demolition job. He better stay at 154 pounds because he won’t have any better luck moving up to middleweight.

Unfortunately for Murtazaliev, the 41-year-old Lara (31-3-3, 19 KOs) is unlikely to agree to fight him either. Lara hasn’t fought a top-level opponent in seven years since her 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 fight, he’ll be stuck defending anyone his management can unearth in the IBF rankings. This is good and bad.

If any good fighter ever wants to fight Murtazaliev, he can hold onto his IBF 154lb title for years without losing it. But on the downside, he’s not going to make the big bucks that he could if the bigger guys were willing to fight him.

The cost of avoidance

Before beating Tszyu, Murtazaliev had been a pro for ten years, fighting little-known opposition. Despite never losing, his career went nowhere.

I wasn’t connected to one of the big promotion companies, and that hurt. Promoters like Eddie Hearn and Top Rank would still have had a lot of trouble fighting Murtazaliev because he would have been seen as too dangerous for other fighters to want to face him.

When you’re as good as Murtazaliev, sometimes it pays not to look so good because you can fight later.

If the two 154 champions have found opponents, maybe move up to 160 and take Lara’s belt?

— bakhram murtazaliev (@bakhram95) January 13, 2025