Undefeated WBC middleweight champion Jermall Charlo 30-0 (22) wants his chance to match his skills against consensus world middleweight champion Saul ‘Canelo’ Alvarez 53-1-2 (36) but will settle for Sergiy Derevyanchenko 13-2 (10) if the fight cannot be made.
The 30-year-old Texan was last in action in December when he stopped natural 154-pounder Dennis Hogan in seven rounds.
Mexican superstar Alvarez, 29, is still looking for a dance partner for his September date, while Brooklyn-based Ukrainian Derevyanchenko, 34, showed his mettle in a razor-thin 12-round decision loss to Gennadiy Golovkin in New York last October.
“I definitely want to see him fight Canelo,” Charlo’s trainer Ronnie Shields told Ray Flores of Premier Boxing Champions.
“Jermall gets up for big fights. He knows how to get up for big fights. And this is a fight that he wants so bad.
“All fighters want to fight the best guys. In order to call yourself the best, you have to fight the best.
“Jermall has been asking for that fight for a long time. We really thought that once he became the number one contender, the fight would be easy to make.”
The Alvarez fight seems an outside chance, leaving the WBC number one contender the next best viable option.
“But you know what, he just said ‘that he’s going to fight whoever they put me in the ring with and maybe that will draw Canelo out… maybe he will see that I’m beating all these guys and he’ll go back down to 160 or we’ll go up to 168 to fight him’,” Shields continued.
“We’re just hoping and praying that one day we can get him. But in the meantime, we have to fight whoever they put in front of us.
“And right now we have a guy that’s ranked at number one in world right now, that’s Sergiy Derevyanchenko… we’re looking at him and I think right now he’s probably the frontrunner for who we’ll fight next.
“We just want to fight the best guys. Jermall says every day, he tells me every day ‘I just want to fight the best guys out there’.”
 wants his chance to match his skills against consensus world middleweight champion Saul ‘Canelo’ Alvarez 53-1-2 (36) but will settle for Sergiy Derevyanchenko 13-2 (10) if the fight cannot be made.){kind=link}