Shakur Stevenson will officially face Joe Cordina in the featured undercard bout on Oct. 12 in Riyadh, the show headlined by the long-awaited showdown between Artur Beterbiev and Dmitry Bivol.
Stevenson (22-0, 10 KO) will be back in the ring in pretty short order following a July 6 decision win over Artem Harutyunyan, which was his last as a Top Rank fighter. He has a WBC lightweight title obligation against William Zepeda, but that is now targeted for Feb. 2025, and in the meantime, Cordina (17-1, 9 KO) will look to bounce back in a big way after losing his IBF super featherweight title to Anthony Cacace in May.
Also on the card:
- 34-year-old Chris Eubank Jr (33-3, 24 KO) starts his sixth or seventh career reboot with a matchup against Kamil Szeremeta (25-2-2, 8 KO), who is coming off of a 10-round draw this past February in Poland, and doesn’t seem to have really ever recovered from his back-to-back losses to Gennadiy Golovkin and Jaime Munguia in 2020-21.
- Fabio Wardley (17-0-1, 16 KO) and Frazer Clarke (8-0-1, 6 KO) will meet again in a rematch for Wardley’s British and Commonwealth titles in a very fitting setting for those UK domestic belts.
- Jai Opetaia (25-0, 19 KO) will defend his IBF cruiserweight title against Jack Massey (22-2, 12 KO). Massey is coming off of a good win over Isaac Chamberlain in June, and will probably be the second-best opponent of Opetaia’s career, but Opetaia will still obviously be a big favorite.
- Ben Whittaker (8-0, 5 KO) returns against Liam Cameron (23-6, 10 KO), who did give Lyndon Arthur a pretty good run in a June loss.
- Skye Nicolson (11-0, 1 KO) will defend her WBC featherweight title against Raven Chapman (9-0, 2 KO). Nicolson will be rightly favored, but it’s about as good a fight as there is for Skye right now, too.