Undefeated Kiryl Relikh is promising that he's going ruin the plans of WBA super-lightweight champion Ricky Burns on Friday night.
The 26-year-old Belarusian is under the guidance of former world champion Hatton and will climb into the ring at Glasgow's SSE Hydro Arena with a record of 19 knockouts in 21 wins.
If Burns wins the fight, there is already a deal in place to defend belt against former four division world champion Adrien Broner on a date in December.
Burns makes the first defence of the belt he won in May when he knocked out Michele Di Rocco in the same arena in eight rounds. Broner will be heading to Scotland to see the Coatbridge fighter in action.
Relikh has plans of his own. He intends to capture Burns' belt and then move forward with his own fight against Broner. He wants to reach the heights of his idol, middleweight king Gennady Golovkin.
“Burns will not be fighting Broner because, for that to take place, he would need to beat me first and that is not going to happen,” said Relikh. “So I will take Ricky’s title and then I will fight Broner and I will stop him as well. That is my destiny. I am not being disrespectful to the other fighters when I say this – I am just better than they are.”
"I'm very confident going into this fight but I have always believed in my own ability – the first time I met Ricky Hatton I wanted to get into the ring with him!” he claimed. “Someone asked me yesterday who my favourite boxer is and I said: ‘Me.’ That’s how good I think I am.
“The only other boxer I believe to be on the same level as me at the moment is Gennady Golovkin and I want to emulate what he has done. He has had 33 KOs in 36 fights and that’s the type of fighter I am. I’ve come here not just to beat Ricky Burns but to stop him.
“I predict that I will end the fight in six rounds. I know that he is a tough man and that he boxed on with a broken jaw in an earlier fight so I will probably need to knock him out anyway. “However, that’s what I intend to do every time I step into a ring so this will be no different. Ricky is in for a hard night."
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