By Keith Idec
Showtime announced Tuesday morning that the premium-cable network will televise the Jorge Linares-Anthony Crolla rematch March 25 from Manchester, England.
Linares defeated England’s Crolla by unanimous decision in an action-packed, 12-round fight September 24 to win the WBA world lightweight championship at Manchester Arena, the same site of their 12-round rematch.
The 31-year-old Linares (41-3, 27 KOs), a three-division world champion, won their action-packed clash by close margins on two of three scorecards.
Judge John Keane scored the fight 115-114 for Linares. Fernando Barbosa had Linares ahead 115-113 following 12 rounds. Guillermo Perez Pineda credited Linares with a wider win, 117-111.
The 30-year-old Crolla (31-5-3, 13 KOs) was making the second defense of a WBA 135-pound championship in his last fight against Linares. He won the championship two fights earlier, when he knocked out Colombia’s Darleys Perez (33-2-2, 21 KOs) in the fifth round of a November 2015 meeting at Manchester Arena.
Linares, a former featherweight and super featherweight title-holder, has won 10 straight fights since suffering back-to-back technical knockout defeats to Antonio DeMarco and Sergio Thompson in 2011 and 2012.
Showtime didn’t announce the time of this telecast, but the Linares-Crolla rematch is scheduled to air live and thus figures to begin sometime late in the afternoon or early in the evening on the East Coast in the United States.
Committing to televising Linares-Crolla is an indication that Showtime is interested in broadcasting a bout between the Linares-Crolla winner and the victor Saturday night between WBC world lightweight champion Dejan Zlaticanin (22-0, 15 KOs), of Podgorica, Montenegro, and former two-division champion Mikey Garcia (35-0, 29 KOs), of Oxnard, California.
The Zlaticanin-Garcia fight will open Showtime’s telecast Saturday night from MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas (10 p.m. ET/7 p.m. PT). The main event will be a rematch that’ll pit Northern Ireland’s Carl Frampton (23-0, 14 KOs), the WBA world featherweight champion, against Leo Santa Cruz (32-1-1, 18 KOs), a former three-division champion from Rosemead, California.
Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.
