JULIO CESAR CHAVEZ Jr. vs MATT VANDA

The Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. show rolls on with a rematch against Matt Vanda in Saturday’s PPV main event in Las Vegas.

This junior middleweight 10-rounder is one of those fights that had to be made because of the perception that Chavez was fortunate to escape with a split decision win over Vanda in Mexico in July.

Chavez ran out of gas that night and had to endure a bit of a hammering in the late stages. He flopped, exhausted, onto his corner stool at the final bell. The crowd, disappointed at seeing Chavez being chased all around the ring by Vanda in the final round, booed the young fighter. The decision didn’t seem too popular, either, although I think the main focus of the fans’ indignation was the scorecard of the judge who had Chavez winning every round. I thought that Chavez deserved to win, but no way was it a shutout.

The most astonishingly awful scorecard I can think of was the one that had Jose Navarro winning every round against Cristian Mijares in a fight that Mijares clearly won, but the worst individual-round assessment of all time might have been the last-round score rendered by the judge in the Vanda-Chavez fight.

Vanda was coming on so strongly in the 10th that it even looked possible that Chavez might get stopped. A judge wouldn’t have been too far out to have made it a 10-8 round for Vanda. For a judge to give the 10th round of that fight to Chavez was beyond belief.

I’m sure you get the picture by now. Chavez was running on empty. If that fight had been a 12-rounder, he would have been in terrible trouble.

Chavez has since revealed that he was physically unwell going into the fight. "Last time Julio was sick but this time he is healthy and ready," Chavez's trainer said at the Los Angeles press conference to announce the fight.

"I don't like to give excuses but it wasn't my night," Chavez said.

Vanda, meanwhile, told the media gathering that he plans to start in the 11th round where he left off in the 10th round of July’s fight. “I'm going to kick his ass,” Vanda promised.

This looks like being a spirited fight, what those of us who don’t take the punches might call a fun fight: Fun to watch, maybe not quite so much fun for the competitors.

Vanda, the multi-tattooed veteran from Minnesota, stood up to an early, body-battering attack and finished the stronger man last July. It was Chavez’s toughest fight.

If Chavez can fight a better fight and win impressively on Saturday, his career can keep going forward. If he has another life-and-death struggle — or, of course, if he loses — it will be clear that he has reached the limit of his potential.

Chavez, unfortunately, has not given a truly impressive performance for some time. His wins over Jose Celaya and Ray Sanchez III were arduous affairs. It took him nine rounds to break down the ordinary Tobia Loriga, who was knocked out in one round in an Italian title fight just three months later.

Strangely enough, Chavez was showing perhaps his best-ever form in the early rounds against Vanda, ripping in some really good shots to the body, but the game veteran wouldn’t cave in, and all too soon the younger man was flying distress signals as the old-time British writers used to say.

To his credit, Chavez stuck it out when he was on his last legs. He was just about done, but he made it to the final bell. Chavez showed heart, and, as Vanda himself will say, it wasn’t Chavez’s fault that one judge turned in an egregious scorecard.

Now Chavez has the chance to show that he wasn’t his real self that night.

Vanda is a rugged, gritty campaigner but Chavez really should be able to come through with a win. We all know that he will never reach the greatness attained by his famous father — that bar has been set impossibly high — but the younger Chavez has been a good crowd-pleaser, a hit-and-get-hit fighter whose attack is his best defence, and I would class him as a solid midlevel type of attraction. Perhaps this is going to be as good as it gets. Saturday’s fight might provide the answer.

Vanda will be tough and stubborn, as ever, but Chavez has the superior skill and faster hands, and he has to be considered the bigger banger. I am expecting Chavez to be better prepared and stronger than he was in July, and I think he will win convincingly this time — and if Chavez doesn’t have a stamina issue on Saturday, I think a stoppage win late in the fight is not an unrealistic expectation.