Jorge Linares
At a press conference on 23 January 2017, Frank Warren announced that Flanagan would be making his fifth defence of his WBO world title against former super lightweight world title challenger Petr Petrov (38-4-2, 19 KO's) on 8 April 2017 at the Manchester Arena in Manchester. This would be the first time since October 2015 that Flanagan would be fighting in his home city. The fight went the distance and Flanagan won via unanimous decision. One judge scored the fight a close 116-112 whilst the other two had wide margins of 118-110 and 120-108. Many media outlets including ESPN believed the wider scores were unfair and disrespectful to Petrov even though he may not have done enough to win the fight, he made a lot of rounds close and hard to score. Flanagan said he and his team would target the big names including Jorge Linares and Vasyl Lomachenko.