GIOVANNI SEGURA vs JUANITO RUBILLAR

Exciting and hard hitting Giovanni Segura gets a short-notice replacement when he meets Filipino veteran Juanito Rubillar in a light-flyweight title fight on the Latin Fury 10 PPV show in Mexico on Saturday.

Rubillar is a durable southpaw who apparently was in training in Los Angeles when he got the call to meet Segura after his compatriot Sonny Boy Jaro met with visa problems. Although Rubillar was stopped in seven rounds by WBC champion Edgar Sosa last November, when he was hurt to the body, he is normally a robust fighter. He was stopped twice in Thailand more than a decade ago but two full-distance fights with heavy hitting Jorge Arce showed that Rubillar can take punishment and keep fighting.

The main interest in Saturday's fight, I think, is whether Segura will be able to win inside the distance.

Segura was like a punching machine in his last fight when he overwhelmed Cesar Canchila in four rounds, avenging a one-sided points defeat suffered in Las Vegas a year ago.

In the first fight, Segura floored Canchila early in the bout but tired visibly after the first few rounds.

“Losing that fight was the best thing that ever happened,” Segura’s manager, Ricky Mota, said over the phone from Los Angeles. “He wasn’t listening to us. He got a little bit over confident. He thought, his punch and his power, he would knock everybody out. When you get tough guys like Canchila, he found out that it doesn’t work that way. He wasn’t really in shape. If you noticed, in two rounds he was winded already. I don’t know how he made the 12 rounds — he has a lot of heart. Luckily Top Rank believed in us, they gave him another chance and got him a rematch, and he delivered.”

Segura is now being trained by Javier Capetillo, who although under a cloud after the Antonio Margarito “loaded handwraps” incident is nevertheless held in high regard as a tutor and conditioner.

“Capetillo has some issues but he gets his fighters in tremendous shape, he’s a world-class trainer,” Mota said. Segura’s conditioning showed when he punched almost nonstop to overpower Canchila in their rematch. “Canchila on any given night I think he could beat any other 108-pound champion, but he wasn’t going to beat Giovanni that night," Mota said. "Giovanni’s had a tremendous camp, he’s looking forward to defending the title in Mexico — he says he can’t wait.”

Segura admits that his conditioning let him down in the loss to Canchila. He said that with so many of his fights ending in knockouts, it wasn’t until he got involved in a long, hard fight that he realised he simply wasn’t boxing at the degree of fitness that was required at the top level. “I focused more on my conditioning,” Segura said over the phone from Mexico this week. “Javier Capetillo told me he wasn’t going to change me as a boxer but he was going to beat the hell out of me in training. He told me: ‘I’ll do my job, you do yours and everything will be OK.’ We get along pretty good.”

Canchila fought valiantly but was unable to hold off a surging Segura in a fight that seemed to me like a lighter-weight version of Hagler-Hearns: punches flying in a four-round war.

We can expect a similarly aggressive fight from him on Saturday, Canchila said. “I’m a Mexican fighter and I represent the Mexican style,” he said. “I’m a naturally strong person. You know who you are and what you’ve got, and I don’t think anybody can beat me right now. I train really hard. This is my time.”

Rubillar should be a good test for Segura. He beat the skilful Omar Nino Romero last year, but was outboxed in the rematch in June, losing by technical decision when the Mexican fighter suffered cuts in head clashes. Although Rubillar lost to Sosa and Romero in his last two fights, he had won seven in a row before this.

This, though, is essentially a Segura showcase. He says he wants to fight the best at 108 pounds and sees himself moving up in weight and winning championships at 112 and 115 pounds. He looks being much too young and too powerful for the 32-year-old Rubillar.

Although Rubillar is a seasoned, competent fighter who keeps a tight defence, I don’t think he will be able to hold off Segura for too many rounds. Segura can be wild with his punches but he hurts an opponent when he hits him, and with his style of switching from the orthodox to the southpaw stance and back again he can confuse the other man with shots that come from all angles. He is likely to meet resistance from Rubillar in the early rounds, but I think that by the eighth Segura will be hammering the Filipino so severely that the referee will feel obliged to intervene.