Right Then, Let's Call This What It Is
Right then. On Wednesday, Queensberry Promotions won the purse bid to stage Hamzah Sheeraz against his WBO mandatory challenger Janibek Alimkhanuly. We covered it here. A purse bid being won is supposed to be the end of the argument — the money is on the table, the promoter is appointed, the fight gets made.
Instead, the WBO have now confirmed that Sheeraz has vacated the title.
Let's not beat around the bush. A purse bid is the sport's mechanism for exactly this situation. It exists precisely so a champion cannot say the numbers do not work, because the open market has just told everybody what the numbers are. Sheeraz looked at that number, looked at Janibek Alimkhanuly, and gave the belt back.
Why Janibek Is The Man Nobody Wants
Make no mistake, this is not a random mandatory. Alimkhanuly is the most swerved fighter in the 160 to 168 corridor and has been for years.
He is a southpaw with a genuinely horrible skill set for anyone in front of him. He does not waste punches, he does not get dragged into a firefight he has not chosen, and he finishes people who make one mistake too many. He has spent a large chunk of his career waiting on phones that never rang and watching belts get passed around men who would not share a ring with him.
This is a fighter who has been the official mandatory, the obvious next fight and the biggest risk in the division all at once. Now he has watched a champion vacate rather than take the assignment. Again.
The Money Defence Does Not Hold
There will be a version of this story where the purse split was unfair, the promoter did not value him properly, and a proud fighter walked away on principle. You will hear it in the next few days.
Here is the problem with it. If the argument is money, the purse bid is the answer to the argument. That is the whole point of the process. You do not get to complain that the market undervalued you and then refuse to let the market pay you.
And there is a second problem. Sheeraz has options at 168 that most fighters would take a hand off for. He has the profile, he has the promotional backing, he is marketable in Britain and in the Gulf. If the only fight he did not want was the hardest one, that tells you what the belt was for.
What Sheeraz Actually Loses Here
He keeps his record. He keeps his earning power. In the short term he probably keeps his ranking. But he has given away the one thing that is genuinely hard to get back.
A world champion who vacates rather than defend carries that around. It comes up in every build for every future fight. It comes up when he calls out somebody bigger and they laugh and say the word Janibek back at him. It comes up in every list of the division that gets written for the next five years.
Sheeraz is 27 and talented. He can punch, he is big for the weight, and there was a version of this year where he beat Alimkhanuly and announced himself as the real thing at super middleweight. That version is gone now, and it was available to him on Wednesday with the funding already confirmed.
Where The Belt Goes
The obvious route is Alimkhanuly fighting for the vacant strap against the next man in the WBO order. He has earned it about four times over. If there is any justice in the sanctioning bodies — and I accept that is a big if — he gets the belt put around him without having to beg for another two years.
The division itself is fine. David Benavidez has moved his attention to cruiserweight, the weight class is wide open, and there are live fights everywhere. It is just that one of them got cancelled by a man who already had it funded.
Luke's Verdict
I will be straight. I had Sheeraz down as one of the better British stories of the next two years, and I am not going to pretend this does not change my read on him.
You can lose to Janibek Alimkhanuly and come out of it with your reputation intact — plenty would. What you cannot do is have the fight ordered, funded and dated and then hand the belt back, and expect people to talk about you the same way afterwards. If you know, you know.
My call: Alimkhanuly wins the vacant WBO title inside the next six months, and Sheeraz does not fight anybody in the top three at 168 in the next twelve. I would love to be wrong. Take the rematch of the conversation, Hamzah — ring Janibek in the spring and I will write the apology myself.
More on the super middleweight picture across our news page, and the confirmed dates sit on the fight schedule.