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Caleb Plant Suffers Hand Injury, Title Opportunity On Hold

Boxing James DeGale
Carlos Toro Aug 10, 2018 11:30PM

Caleb Plant’s shot at the IBF super middleweight title will have to wait for a while after suffering a hand injury.

Plant, the mandatory challenger to the IBF title currently being held by Jose Uzcategui, revealed on Instagram that he suffered a hand injury while training. The Instagram post can be seen below.

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Hate to inform you guys that we had a injury during training that is going to keep me and @josebolivita.uzcategui IBF world title fight from happening as planned. I hope we can come to a agreement to still make it happen because I know that’s a fight the boxing world was ready to see. Working 17 years towards something for this to happen is not what I wanted or had planned for but this is a small set back compared to some of the other things that have came about during my journey and I’ve made it through all of those and still been victorious just as I’ll be as soon as this heals. I’ll be back as soon as possible and I’m sorry to let my family, friends and fans down with this but what’s for me is mine and I welcome it because it will make “AND THE NEWWW” mean all the more. We must first learn to appreciate the downs so we can know what it means to be up.

A post shared by Caleb Plant (@calebplant) on

Although the fight had not been officially announced, the fight looked to perhaps happen either at the end of August or September. This would have been Uscategui’s first title defense as the full IBF world champion. Uzcategui was the interim IBF champion, winning the title earlier this year.

The IBF world champion at the time was James DeGale, but after DeGale vacated the title back in July, Uzcategui was elevated to full champion with the expectation that Uzcategui would defend the title against Plant.

Plant, a former Golden Gloves winner at light heavyweight, won the right to challenge for the title after winning a title eliminator against Rogelio Medina back in February on a PBC on FOX card. The 26-year-old Plant is currently undefeated after 17 pro fights, winning 10 of those fights by knockout.

There is no word on who Uzcategui will fight next, but the two next highest ranked contenders down the IBF super middleweight rankings are Vincent Feigenbutz (No. 3) and Anthony Dirrell (No. 4). Feigenbutz has a fight scheduled for next month and Dirrell is rumored to be challenging for David Benavidez's WBC super middleweight title, but that fight has yet to be announced. The next contender down the rankings is former WBA super middleweight champion Fedor Chudinov, ranked No. 5 in the IBF.

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