By Allen Fox: WBA junior middleweight champion Miguel Cotto is focused on avenging his 11th round knockout defeat at the hands of Antonio Margarito from three years ago when Cotto fights Margarito in a rematch on December 3rd at Madison Square Garden in New York, New York.

Cotto burns with the desire to get revenge for that fight, because he suspects that Margarito might have been fighting with loaded gloves in that bout.

Cotto boxed beautifully in that fight, hitting Margarito with shots and getting out of the way before the Mexican fighter could land his own shots. However, the pace of the fight seemed to be wearing on Cotto by the 9th round, as he was starting to look exhausted and he wasn’t slowing Margarito’s forward progress at all with his shots. T

hings have changed since then, as Margarito has lost two out of his last three fights and hasn’t looked like the same fighter that won that fight. However, Margarito showed incredible heart in his last fight against Manny Pacquiao, refusing to take the easy way out when the fight was well out of reach for him. Margarito is still an excellent pressure fighter and with his still powerful punches, he could very well wear Cotto down in a rematch.

Cotto said this to examiner.com on the subject of Margarito: “I swear to you all and my family that December 3rd is the same story but a very different end. I assure you that the preparation will be arduous, intense, hard work for me, so i don;’t make the mistakes I made three years ago.”

It’s very likely that Cotto will try to take a page out of the playbook that Pacquiao used on beating Margarito by hitting and moving to avoid getting hit in return. Pacquiao had a lot of success with using his jab and movement to shut Margarito’s offense down in the 6th after he hurt Pacquiao with a body shot.

However, Pacquiao didn’t rely on movement for the entire fight, as he continually went back to standing in front of Margarito looking to exchange shots. It’s perhaps for this reason Pacquiao took a lot of punishment in that fight, more than any of his other fights he’s had in recent years he says.

I think Pacquiao couldn’t keep moving enough even if he wanted to, because Margarito is so good at cutting off the ring and forcing his opponents to fight. You just can’t count on staying away for the full 12 rounds without Margarito catching you over and over again. In that case, Cotto is going to have to possess a good chin for the Margarito fight or else we’ll have the same result as last time with Cotto taking a beating and going down. Cotto is prone to cuts because of all the scar tissue around both of his eyes, and the same goes for Margarito but to a lesser extent. If Cotto gets cut, the fight will change dramatically.