(Photo: Sakio Fakoda) By Dan Ambrose: Unbeaten middleweight contender Peter Quillin is giving WBC middleweight champion Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. a good chance of defeating 37-year-old Sergio Martinez in their fight on September 15th in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Quillin thinks it comes down to whether or not Chavez Jr. can take Martinez’s big left hand power shots and whether Martinez can keep moving to avoid getting beaten up like Andy Lee was last Saturday night in a 7th round TKO loss in El Paso, Texas.

Quillin told ESPN’s NYfightblog “I think Chavez puts up a better fight against Sergio than people give him credit for. If Sergio can keep on his toes and box, or if he can hurt Chavez when he punches him then the fight goes in his favor. But if Chavez can withstand Sergio’s punching power and keep up his pressure…the fight will be in his favor.”

I agree with Quillin. Martinez has a couple of ways he can beat Chavez Jr: He can stay on the move and pound out a 12 round decision by using fast in and out attacks or Martinez can look to land one big left hand to the head of Chavez Jr. to end the fight. It isn’t as if Martinez will have to go looking for Chavez Jr. because he’s easy to hit and will be standing right in front of Martinez each time he stops moving. Chavez Jr. can take a heck of a wallop, but it’s unclear whether he can take the kinds of shots that Martinez will be landing in this fight. Even if Chavez Jr. comes into the fight weighing in his mid-180s, getting hit with Martinez’s powerful left hand bombs will bring him down to size.

I’ve seen Martinez face slow pressure fighters like Chavez Jr. before he’s made them look pretty silly by constantly moving and nailing them with hard shots. That obviously will be a starting point for Martinez in this fight against Chavez Jr., because he’s likely not going to want to repeat the mistakes that Andy Lee made by trying to stand in close and fight Chavez Jr.

That’s not Martinez’s game and I don’t expect him to fight stupid like Lee did. Lee has always been a fighter that likes to go to war with his opponents, and it really cost him against the much bigger Chavez Jr. Martinez is a small middleweight, and he’s not going to let the 180 pound Chavez Jr. crowd him so that he can land his body shots. If Chavez Jr. is going to land any body shots in the fight, he’s going to have to do it on the run, and that’s going to take most of the steam out of the punches.