Cotto will need to stick and move all night to beat Margarito

By Boxing News - 10/07/2011 - Comments

Image: Cotto will need to stick and move all night to beat MargaritoBy Allen Fox: WBA junior middleweight champion Miguel Cotto may have doubts as to whether or not Antonio Margarito used loaded hand-wraps for their fight three years ago, but Cotto would be making a huge mistake if he tries to stand and trade with Margarito in the belief that he’s got no power. This is the problem.

If Cotto thinks he was beaten by a Margarito with loaded up gloves, he might be inclined to to try and slug with Margarito instead of using movement like he did the last time he fought him. Cotto doesn’t seem to have the size or the power to run over guys at junior middleweight. He may have done well against Yuri Foreman, but that guy had no power to speak of and was fighting with only one good leg.

Cotto still took a lot of shots from Foreman, and took even more against Ricardo Mayorga in the early rounds of the fight when Cotto tried to slug with the 38-year-old Mayorga. Margarito is probably around 80% of what he was in 2008. He clearly isn’t throwing as many punches as he used to, but that’s partly because he’s faced guys like Shane Mosley and Manny Pacquiao, who used a lot of movement against him to prevent Margarito from getting his shots off. Mosley also used a great deal of clinching after throwing punches.

This left Margarito with little option to try and get his own punches in. Cotto will probably try and stick and move to win rounds. But he’s got to do it a slower pace than he did in their fight in 2008, because Cotto doesn’t have the stamina to move for 12 rounds.

If you look at how heavy Cotto was when he started training camp recently in which he was sporting a fat gut, he’s had to use this training camp as part of a fat farm to take weight off instead of just using it to work on fight training. Anytime you took off 20 to 30 pounds, there’s going to be some weakening involved for the fighter. And if Cotto is going to have to run for 12 rounds, he may not have the energy to defend himself when he runs out of energy later in the fight.



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