By Aaron Klein: After watching last night’s 11th round TKO win for Antonio Margarito (37-5, 27 KOs) over WBA welterweight champion Miguel Cotto (32-1, 26 KOs) at the MGM Grand, in Las Vegas, Nevada, I’m thinking that an immediate rematch is needed to allow for Cotto to avenge his defeat. While I concede that Margarito did a good job of breaking down Cotto slowly over the course of the fight to eventually stop him, I doubt think the best man won on Saturday night. I mean, Cotto seemed to give away the fight more than it being a case of him being beaten by Margarito, who was being outclassed for most of the fight until the 10th round when he hurt Cotto in the last 10 seconds of the round with a series of hooks to the head.

Instead of clinching Margarito often, like most good fighters like Wladimir Klitschko and Bernard Hopkins do to slow down aggressive fighters, Cotto instead elected to run and trade punches with Margarito. The running was less dangerous for him, to be sure, but it had the effect of wearing Cotto down much earlier than he would have been if he had just elected to clinch like most fighters would if put in a similar circumstance. The thing of it is, I knew Cotto wouldn’t clinch, and I bet Margarito knew it as well from having viewed most of Cotto’s fights, because he seems to really dislike being clinched, treating fighters that do that with bitter disdain.

If you want prove, take a look at Cotto’s fight with Oktay Urkal, a fighter that clinched Cotto often in their bout, which had the effect of slowing down the fight to a craw and keeping Cotto from getting off many of his big shots. For whatever the reason, Cotto is a little too old school for his own good, and it ended up costing him against Margarito. He needs to re-think this disgust for clinching and start making it a part of his offense like he did with his recent development of a good jab.

I have no doubts what so ever, that Cotto could easily beat Margarito in a rematch if Cotto was able to clinch him often after throwing flurries. Obviously, Cotto had only two plans going into his bout with Margarito, starting with his trying to throw fast flurries to score points. This worked well, but it didn’t stop Margarito from coming forward and landing his own shots to the body and head. When this didn’t work, Cotto attempted to run from him, using a lot of lateral and backward motion to fight on the move. That was a bit more successful. However, it also took a lot of energy out of Cotto, as he wasn’t ready to run for the entire 12 rounds, and when he did stop to take a breather at the end of the 10th round, Margarito hurt him with a big left hook followed by a flurry of punches to the head.

Again, Cotto failed to clinch Margarito and ended up letting him hit him with a string of unanswered punches. The same goes for the 11th round, when Cotto seemed to think that he could run out the clock in the round, but it didn’t work. Margarito immediately closed the distance and tagged him with a right and then a left-right combination that sent Cotto down to one knee. After he got up, his face was bloody masque of blood, his nose looking badly broken and his eyes cut to the point he probably could see almost nothing but red. Margarito merely sprinted after him like a runaway freight train.

Seeing Margarito coming at him at full speed, Cotto did the safe thing and took a knee to protect himself – and his future – from sustaining any more punishment. After the fight was stopped, Cotto showed pure class by congratulating Margarito for his victory and showing that there were no hard feelings. The fight, however, proved nothing other than that Margarito can beat Cotto when he’s fighting his kind of fight.

However, if Cotto had fought with his brain instead of his heart, we probably would have seen him win by an easy 12-round decision, likely winning every round. I think Margarito only has one option – which is to fight Cotto in an immediate rematch. Let’s face it, there’s no other opponents out there that will being in the crowds and excitement that Cotto can bring in, and the boxing public badly wants to see a rematch after witnessing how exciting this fight was.