By Keith Idec

NEW YORK – Terence Crawford feels underappreciated.

The unbeaten, two-division champion suspects that as long as he stays at 140 pounds, he won’t be able to satisfy fans who want him to move up to welterweight. Crawford doesn’t even think victories over Filipino superstar Manny Pacquiao and Vasyl Lomachenko will make him more credible among his harshest critics.

“I never get all the credit I deserve, but that’s boxing,” Crawford said before a press conference Tuesday at Madison Square Garden to announce his May 20 fight against Felix Diaz (HBO). “I take it and roll with it, and just keep on winning and doing what I have to do to become one of the greats. Beating Lomachenko and Pacquiao, all they’re gonna do is criticize me. They’re gonna say the same thing – Lomachenko’s too small or Pacquiao’s past his prime.

“So it’ll take me to fight somebody that’s in their prime, that they think, ‘Oh, well, you’ve got these two guys in their prime and they’re fighting each other and Terence beat him in a tremendous fashion.’ Maybe they’ll give me my credit then, but who knows?”

Crawford (30-0, 21 KOs), the WBC/WBO super lightweight champion, has been trying to secure a fight against Pacquiao (59-6-2, 38 KOs) for the past year-and-a-half. Pacquiao appears headed toward a meaningless fight against Australia’s Jeff Horn (16-0-1, 11 KOs) on July 2 in Brisbane, but Bob Arum, who promotes Pacquiao and Crawford, has said a Pacquiao-Crawford fight is possible for later this year.

Lomachenko (7-1, 5 KOs) has said he could move up to lightweight later this year, but currently fights two weight classes below Crawford. The Ukrainian southpaw will return to the ring Saturday night, when he’ll defend his WBO world super featherweight title against Jason Sosa (20-1-4, 15 KOs) at MGM National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Maryland (HBO).

The 29-year-old Crawford expects to eventually move up to 147 pounds, though he’s not sure that’ll silence his critics, either.

“It’s gonna be the same,” said Crawford, who has fought five times at 140 pounds since moving up two years ago. “Because when I was at 135, everybody was screaming, ‘Oh, he’s too big for 35.’ The same thing that they’re saying right now is the same thing that they were saying when I was at 135. Then, when I moved up, I had like two fights and they was like, ‘Oh, you need to move up to 147.’ I was like, ‘Well, I just moved up to 140.’ So when I move up to 147, they’re gonna be like, ‘You need to go up to 154 and fight Klitschko.’ ”

When asked why some people keep pressing him to move up, Crawford claimed it’s because they can’t wait for him to suffer his first professional defeat.

“When you look at it,” Crawford said, “when you have a good fighter that’s on the verge of being great, you wanna do any and everything you possibly can to see him lose. Same thing they did with Mayweather. You know, wanting Mayweather to fight a Triple-G, knowing how big Triple-G is, but you want the odds to be so stacked against this man, so he just can lose. So it’s never gonna stop.”

Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for krikya360.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.