Chavez Jr. will try and box Rubio to survive to the finish

By Boxing News - 01/08/2012 - Comments

Image: Chavez Jr. will try and box Rubio to survive to the finishBy Allen Fox: For boxing fans wondering how WBC middleweight champion Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. (44-0-1, 31 KO’s) will be able to survive for 12 rounds against hard hitting no.1 challenger Marco Antonio Rubio (53-5-1, 46 KO’s) next month, it’s pretty easy to guess by watching Chavez’s last performance against Peter Manfredo Jr. in their fight last November.

For the first time in his eight-year pro career, the 25-year-old Chavez Jr. was boxing and moving instead of just looking to slug it out. Chavez Jr. didn’t move all night, but he did a fair amount of circling the ring in the five rounds of action before halting the overmatched Manfredo in the 5th. But that was against a fringe contender, who started out ranked at the bottom of the WBC when the fight was halted. Manfredo isn’t like the legitimately #1 ranked contender Rubio, who can really punch and isn’t overmatched.

This is going to be a really dangerous fight for Chavez Jr. and he’s going to have to follow his trainer Freddie Roach’s instructions to the letter in order to avoid getting knocked out. I think the most important thing for Chavez Jr. is to get to the finish line without getting knocked down. If he make it to the end of the fight, I suspect he’ll get the nod from the judges based on his popularity rather than in what he does in the ring. As long as he doesn’t get really dominated, I think Chavez Jr. is hard to because he’s a proven fan draw.

Chavez Jr. is going to have to stay on the move, though, if he wants the win here because Rubio hits too hard and Chavez Jr. hasn’t grasped the fundamentals in how to protect himself in the ring. For Chavez Jr., his offense is really his defense. He’s a guy that has terrible defensive skills but who has been able to beat everyone largely because of his huge size for the middleweight division, his good offensive skills and the fact that he’s been matched against such poor opposition.

Just recently, Chavez Jr. has been brought up to the 1st tier in terms of competition but even then, he’s been in with fringe contenders like John Duddy, Billy Lyell and Manfredo Jr. His fight against Sebastian Zbik as pretty much the first time in Chavez’s career that he fought a genuine A level fighter, and Chavez Jr. didn’t exactly shine in that fight. He won but mostly because Zbik had no power to speak of. But the German fighter landed a lot of shots against Chavez Jr. and gave him tons of problems.



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