By Manuel Perez: Shane Mosley (45-5, 38 KOs) has been saying that he doesn’t plan on running from WBA welterweight champion Antonio Margarito (37-5, 27 KOs) in their title bout on January 24th at the Staples Center, in Los Angeles, California. For Mosley’s sake, I hope he’s joshing about this, because Shane is going to take a real pounding if he’s serious about this. Having confidence in oneself is nice thing to have but there’s also reality, and the reality is, if Mosley stands and tries to fight it out with Margarito, Shane is going to be the equivalent of bicyclist being run over by a speeding truck.
It’s a given that Mosley is the faster fighter by far, that’s not even question. However, what is in question is whether Mosley, now 37-years-old, has enough left to beat a bigger fighter with a work rate as high as Margarito.
This isn’t Oscar De La Hoya that Mosley’s fighting. This is a fighter much fiercer than De La Hoya ever was, and who can take a shot and still keep coming forward. Mosley feels that he knows Mexican fighters well due to his prior experience against fighters like De La Hoya and Fernando Vargas, but frankly neither of them are anything like Margarito in the slightest.
Mosley could fight those guys a thousand times and yet still get drilled into the canvas by Margarito on January 24th, if Mosley chooses to stand and trade shots with him. A major problem for Mosley is that he probably can’t run from Margarito even if he wanted to, because of his age.
Mosley might have it in him to run for a three or four rounds, if that, but anything beyond that and would probably be asking way too much of Shane. No, what he’ll probably do is stay in front of Margarito, looking to throw fast shots and immediately hold him.
I think that’s his best and only way of winning. It will be the old punch and grab technique, often used by older fighters or ones that have a chin problem. Mosley will use some lateral movement to a certain extent, moving in slow circles, but it won’t be fast enough to prevent Margarito from cutting off the ring and landing big shots. Once things get really bad for Mosley, probably around the 4th or 5th round, Mosley will probably start clinching constantly so that he can try to slow Margarito down.
It will a little. But Margarito will continue pressing forward and landing with uppercuts and hooks while Mosley is limited to a few punches here and there. It won’t be enough to win any of the rounds as he’ll be getting rocked left and right by Margarito and unable to get him to slow down with his bombardment. Eventually, Mosley will get buried under a storm of shots while backed to the ropes and will get dropped to the canvas. He’ll get up but quickly get taken down again for the count.
Comments are closed.