WBC lightweight champion, Devin Haney has given a few hot-takes prior to his fight on November 7 on DAZN. The undefeated 21-year-old spoke to his promoter Eddie Hearn on an Instagram live stream and addressed a few different topics on the current situation in boxing. The American will face Yuriorkis Gamboa in his first fight in almost a year and seems to be confident ahead of the title defense.
Hearn was forced to watch the press conference live and showed his dismay at having to do so. Speaking about the press-conference, the WBC lightweight champion said, “I definitely think they cheated you. They definitely cheated you.”
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The first thing the two spoke about was his upcoming fight. Talking about fans disrespecting Gamboa as an opponent, Haney said, “Gamboa is by far the toughest test of my career on paper. And a lot of people are just treating it as a blowout and that’s what just makes me want to go out there and prove them right.”
He added that it was difficult to read Gamboa during the face-off, but the Cuban was calm.
Read: Devin Haney Vs Yuriorkis Gamboa – Prediction and Analysis.
Devin Haney addressed the state of the lightweight division
The undefeated champion said that he won’t be moving up to 140lbs anytime soon because there are so many good fights to make in the lightweight division. He spoke about a potential fight against Lomachenko and gave his opinion on Teofimo Lopez and Gervonta Davis.
Speaking about Lomachenko, he said, “I really feel like for a while I couldn’t even get the guy to say my name, I couldn’t even get him to acknowledge me. Do I really care to put my energy into Loma? I don’t know. We just got to cross that road when we get there. As of right now, my main focus is Gamboa first.”
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The 21-year-old spoke about another of his rivals, Teofimo Lopez. He said, “Not at all. I didn’t think that, you know, Lopez would do anything. But I feel like a lot of it, no disrespect to Lopez, but I feel like a lot of it was what Loma didn’t do. He didn’t throw punches for seven rounds.”
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This will give fans the impression that he didn’t rate Lopez’s win very highly. Certain sections may view it as ‘The Dream’ sowing the seeds for a feud against him.
When asked about Davis’ knockout, ‘The Dream’ said, “Phenomenal. He went in there and it was a crazy knockout. But we expected that”. Haney had predicted the result of that fight earlier, and he got it right. It will be interesting to see how all of this materializes in the next few months. However, Haney needs to win the fight against Gamboa and he seems to be focusing only on that for now.
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