By Allan Fox: Moments it was announced by ESPN2 that WBC junior middleweight champion Saul Alvarez (39-0-1, 29 KO’s) will be fighting 40-year-old Shane Mosley (46-7-1, 39 KO’s) on the Floyd Mayweather Jr. – Miguel Cotto undercard on May 5th.
All I can say is what a mismatch! I know Mosley is a fighter with a big name but the guy is no longer ranked in the top 15 in the junior middleweight division and I think he’s just playing out his string looking to get retirement money before he calls it a day. I don’t know if the 21-year-old Alvarez will knock him out, but I’m giving him a fair chance at accomplishing that. At the very least, I see Alvarez giving Mosley a bad one-sided beating and pretty much putting him out of his misery.
A loss here for Mosley would be his fourth in his last seven fights and you could really make an argument that Mosley should have five losses out of his last seven fights at that point because Mosley’s 12 round draw with Sergio Mora in 2010 was hardly a draw. Mosley got dominated in that fight and got a gift draw.
Golden Boy Promotions is obviously picking out Mosley to fight the young Alvarez because they badly need an opponent with a name to face Alvarez in the co-feature bout on the Mayweather-Cotto pay-per-view card on May 5th, and unfortunately there just aren’t any big named fighters at 154 that aren’t dangerous for Alvarez. If you put Alvarez in with a guy like James Kirkland, we could see Alvarez mowed down. Alvarez is a lot like Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. in that he’s not a finished product and really shouldn’t be the WBC champion right now because he still needs to be protected by Golden Boy.
They obviously didn’t want to wait to start cashing in on his appeal to Mexican boxing fans, but they really should have because they’ve had to match Alvarez with almost exclusively mediocre opposition from the moment he captured the vacant World Boxing Council junior middleweight title against fringe WELTERWEIGHT contender Matthew Hatton. Since then, Golden Boy has matched Alvarez against the following fighters in easy title defenses: Ryan Rhodes, Alfonso Gomez and Kermit Cintron. Missing from those names are legitimate quality contenders Vanes Martirosyan, James Kirkland, Erislandy Lara, Paul Williams, Alfredo Angulo, Delvin Rodriguez, Carlos Molina, Demetrius Andrade, and Nobuhiro Ishida. One would hope that someday Alvarez will finally be matched up with guys like that. He can’t be protected forever by Golden Boy.
Mosley’s last win was against Antonio Margarito in January 2009. That’s shocking and what’s even more shocking is Mosley getting a title shot when he’s no longer even ranked in the top 15. That just seems wrong. I know he’s accomplished a lot in his career but when you fall out of the top 15, you should be handed title fights. Mosley’s last fight was for a title against WBO welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao last May.
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