Andrew Moloney and Junto Nakatani have been given the go-ahead to start negotiations for the vacant WBO junior bantamweight belt.
Nakatani (24-0, 16 KOs) was announced as the mandatory challenger for the WBO junior bantamweight championship at the organization's convention in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in October 2022.
Before giving up the belt in October 2022, Nakatani earned the WBO flyweight championship in November 2020 and successfully defended it twice. In his most recent fight, on November 1 of 2022 in Saitama, Japan, the 24-year-old southpaw from Sagamihara, Japan made his junior bantamweight debut by defeating Francisco "Chihuas" Rodriguez, a former unified strawweight champion and current top-ten junior bantamweight contender.
In November 2019, Moloney (25-2, 16 KOs) won the interim WBA junior bantamweight championship. In 2020, right before the epidemic, she was upgraded to the WBA "Regular" title. His reign came to an end in a twelve-round loss against Franco in his June 2020 U.S. debut in Las Vegas, the first bout of their strange trilogy. He was unable to mount a successful defense. In their rematch in November 2020, Moloney was thought to have won back the title by way of a stoppage after two rounds, but the fight was later declared a No-Contest after it was determined that Franco's severely swollen right eye was caused by an unintentional head collision rather than by a strike.
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