Yet another Saturday in the middle of May in 2023, and yet another Moloney bro in a vacant WBO title fight as the co-main event of an ESPN card. In specific, the WBO super flyweight championship - for which Nakatani and Moloney are the current #1 and #2 ranked contenders respectively. The undefeated hard-punching Japanese southpaw was, until last year, the same org's champ a division south. By contrast a career 115lber, the Aussie is a previous 3-time world title challenger going 0-2-0-1, all for the WBA strap, with both losses and the NC all happening to come against the same opponent, Joshua Franco - if you count the interim version of that same title, he is then a four time challenger and onetime victor. Nakatani has a 2½″ height and 2" reach advantage. Moloney had the far more decorated and expansive amateur career.
Oh yeah... I just now, today - for the first time in however many years it's been since we switched the forum software to XenForo - figured out that when setting poll end dates (which itself apparently is too much for half the newbs & numpties that attempt to make poll threads on here to be arsed doing), you actually can set it to a specific time of day instead of being trapped in a multiple of 24 hours from when you post the OP. All you have to do is select the dropdown that defaults to "days", change it to "hours", and then calculate how many days away multiplied by twenty-four, plus however many hours between when you post and when (approximately) the fight should be. I guess I always knew you could use a unit of time besides days, but it never occurred to me that hours might be useful for anything other than a same day poll. But yep, for this one, Saturday is five days away so I changed the default unit from days to hours and typed in 132 (5 x 24 = 120, plus twelve hours from the posting time of 9:38am to have it cutoff at 9:38pm) and voila - it worked. Can't believe it never popped in my head to do it that way.
I've always rated Andrew Moloney highly. More so than his brother. He's a big underdog in this one against an undefeated former world champ moving up in weight. The Japanese may not be quite so good away from the comforts of home though. It's time for Moloney to produce what I've always considered him capable of. Good fight that hopefully is well officiated on what should be neutral turf. May the best man on the day win.
So, (perhaps, speaking of brothers) did we get a firm idea ever of whether there's any relation between Junto and Masayoshi, or was it just a coincidence that we had two different boxers with the surname Nakatani randomly become world rated contenders within a couple of years of each other? I remember asking before and not getting any clarity from even close adherents of the Japanese scene. They're listed as originating from & residing in different cities/prefectures, and there isn't a particularly strong facial resemblance.
Junto and Masayoshi are not related. Nakatani is a common name in Japan. Incidentally, Takeshi Inoue, who fought Tszyu and Munguia, is also not related to Naoya Inoue.
That much I did know. There's a whole Inoue dynasty in the sport (trainer Shingo, his sons Naoya & Takuma, plus at least one cousin, Hiroki, that's a pro fighter, if not more - but all of them are small, competing at 140 at the highest. Takeshi the natural 154lber is much bigger and from a different prefecture, and yeah, no relation as I've been correcting folks on for years) And it may be somewhat common, but it definitely isn't an equivalent of Smith or Jones or anything. It's enough of a unique surname to wonder if two boxers with it emerging more or less contemporaneously is a coincidence.
I can tell you a small article on the asianboxing.info website notes that "Although unrelated they both deserve a lot of credit for what they've done in 2020".
