By Manuel Perez: As the saying goes, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” That may be even more true in terms of this Saturday night’s bout between challenger Antonio Margarito (36-5, 26 KOs) and WBA welterweight champion Miguel Cotto (32-0, 26 KOs) at the MGM Grand, in Las Vegas, Nevada. By an avalanche of opinion, most boxing fans, betters and writers are choosing Cotto, 27, to defeat Margarito. The reason for their choice is varied, having to do mostly with Cotto’s recent development of boxing skills – a jab, better movement and the use of strategy rather than his old style of slugging – as the primary reason why they feel that Cotto will defeat Margarito.

Most of them doubt that Cotto can even come close to matching Margarito punch for punch, but they seem to feel that Cotto will be able to keep from getting hit enough to win the fight by a decision or possibly a knockout. The general consensus is that Cotto won’t be able to hurt Margarito with a shot to the head, and will have to focus on landing a hard body shot in order to drop or take out Margarito.

In most cases, it seems if it’s the aura of Cotto, who has still not shown that he can be beaten, as perhaps the crucial reason why people are siding with him to defeat Margarito. After all, Cotto has never tasted defeat as if yet, having beaten all thirty-two opponents that have been put in front of him thus far in his boxing career. However, he’s had close calls, several of them in fact, getting hurt in fights with Ricardo Torres, DeMarcus Corley, Zab Judah and winning by a narrow margin over a slightly faded Shane Mosley.

The fight against Mosley, which was decided late in the fight, was extremely close and wasn’t a particularly impressive performance by Cotto. In that fight, Cotto appeared to tire out in the second half of the fight, as he showed in his 11th round stoppage of Oktay Urkal in March 2007, and spent a good portion of the later rounds either running from Mosley or trying to box him from the outside using his jab. Due to the limited size and reach of Mosley, Cotto was able to succeed at pulling out the narrow win. However, I think we’ve seen the blueprint in that bout of how he’ll possibly fight Margarito on Saturday night. First off, I think Cotto will attempt to trade with Margarito in the first half of the bout, hoping to take him out with a big body shot or establish his dominance over Margarito.

Short of that, if it’s not happening for him, and he’s taking too much punishment from the nonstop punching attack of Margarito, you can expect to see Cotto retreat to the outside. From there, he’ll circle Margarito often, shooting out his straight jab and long right hands hoping to pound out a decision. If allowed to stay on the outside without much pressure, I can see Cotto winning the fight. This is why it will be very important for Margarito to stay on top of Cotto, not to allow him to wiggle free and try to get to the outside where he can use his jab to try and win a decision.

Margarito doesn’t use his jab much, which is a pity because with his longer arms, he could probably easily win a fight over the alligator-armed Cotto, who is giving up almost a half of foot in reach to Margarito. This in effect would make Cotto have to come at Margarito rather than taking jabs on the outside, which would put Cotto at a tremendous disadvantage where he would have to focus entirely on trying to score a knockout or risk losing to Margarito.

If the fight is even marginally close, of course, Cotto will be given the nod because he’s a much more popular fighter than Margarito is at this point. Cotto is a big fish in a little pond, as Puerto Rico has few real big name stars besides Cotto and Ivan Calderon, which means that all of Puerto Rico will be watching this fight and hoping that Cotto will defeat Margarito.

For his part, Margarito, though popular, isn’t as popular with his native Mexico as are other lesser fighters than him, with Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. being just one example. It’s unclear why he doesn’t have the following that he should considering his incredible fighting skills and his two titles he’s one during his career. But, if he should happen to defeat Cotto on Saturday night, you can expect to see some changes in his popularity, maybe not a whole lot but definitely a significant change.