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By Scott Gilfoid: Making his first defense of his WBO middleweight title, Andy Lee (34-2, 24 KOs) says he’ll be coming fast out of the blocks this Saturday night on April 11th in his title defense against former WBO 160 pound champion Peter Quillin (31-0, 22 KOs) on NBC on Premier Boxing Champions (PBC) at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.

With the fight being televised on NBC, there will potentially be a lot of casual boxing fans seeing Lee and Quillin for the first time. This is their big chance to showcase their talent and win over new fans.

Hopefully both guys will shine and not fall on their face with the performances they put in.

Unlike in his last two fights in which he started off slowly, the 30-year-old Lee wants to take the fight to Quillin immediately in order to keep him from gaining any confidence at all.

The southpaw Lee thinks that if he can start off quickly, he can keep Quillin, 31, from picking up any momentum in the fight. However, if Lee comes out slugging early, he also could run into something and get knocked out.

There’s always that possibility with Lee because we’ve seen him get knocked out in the past by Brian Vera and Julio Cesar Chavez Jr when he foolishly chose to slug with those two fighters rather than boxing them.

There’s a very good chance that Lee loses this fight by a knockout if he tries to slug with the hard-hitting Quillin. In Lee’s last two fights against Matt Korobov and John Jackson, he was trailing in both of them and taking huge shots. But, Lee was able to take advantage of his opponent’s aggressiveness to score knockouts to come from behind and win. In both fights, Lee looked really desperate and needed to do something big to turn the fights around.

“Quillin’s a guy who fights on confidence and, if I let him go in the fight, he might run away with it,” Lee said via independent.ie. “I have to let him know early on that he’s in a fight. It’s not like my last fight where I was comfortable boxing within myself for the first few rounds. This time I have to come our firing from the start and impose myself. If I do that I’ll be on my way to winning the fight.”

It sounds like Lee has his mind made up that he’s going to slug with Quillin. I wonder what Lee’s trainer Adam Booth thinks of the idea of the spindly legged Lee coming out firing on all cylinders. Booth has generally been a very cautious trainer in the past with his fighters. He’s not the type that would tell one of his fighters to come out slugging. I mean, I’d be very surprised if Booth tells Lee to come out and trade with Quillin from the opening bell because that would be a good way to get Lee knocked out again.

Quillin, aka Kid Chocolate, hasn’t fought since beating Lukas Konecny by a 12 round unanimous decision last year in April. That was the last time that Quillin made a title defense of his WBO middleweight title. After that, Quillin opted to vacate his World Boxing Organization title after he was ordered by the WBO to defend it against Matt Korobov.

In hindsight, it would have been a better thing for Quillin simply to have faced Korobov and taken his chances against him. For whatever reasons, Quillin decided on not facing the Russian fighter. The good news is that Lee did the job for Quillin by knocking Korobov out. The bad news is that now Quillin has to face the guy that beat Korobov. Unless Quillin was intimidated by Korobov’s style or something, he could potentially have a tougher fight against Lee than he would have had against Korobov.

It certainly isn’t going to help Quillin that he’s been out of the ring for an entire year. Facing a southpaw also isn’t a good thing for Quillin. Even if he’s trained with a lot of southpaws in getting ready for this fight, it’s still not a good thing to be fighting a southpaw. Quillin isn’t a very good inside fighter, but he doesn’t have to worry about Lee taking advantage of that because he’s not a good inside fighter either.