Canelo to get big December fight if he gets past Josesito Lopez on September 15th

By Boxing News - 07/23/2012 - Comments

Image: Canelo to get big December fight if he gets past Josesito Lopez on September 15thBy Dan Ambrose: WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo Alvarez (40-0-1, 29 KO’s) is poised to get a big money pay-per-view fight in December against possibly Floyd Mayweather Jr. or Miguel Cotto if the 22-year-old Alvarez gets past his next opponent WBC Silver welterweight champion Josesito Lopez (30-4, 18 KO’s) on September 15th on Showtime at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Alvarez has been really pushing for a fight against Floyd, but the fight still hasn’t happened due to Floyd’s legal problems and him feeling like Alvarez still needed some more fights under him to make their fight a lot bigger. Alvarez’s bout against Lopez still may not be a big enough one to connect with casual boxing fans. The problem here is that Lopez isn’t a big name, and there’s a huge fight on the same night between WBC middleweight champion Julio Cesar Chavez Jr vs. Sergio Martinez on HBO PPV.

That fight pits a fighter with a recognizable name in Chavez Jr against a guy that a lot of casual boxing fans are already familiar with in Martinez. Alvarez doesn’t have that. He’s still pretty much an unknown himself in the U.S, and his opponent Lopez is more of an obscure fighter except with the hardcore boxing fans. If you ask the average person on the street if they’ve ever heard of Alvarez or Lopez and you’d find few people who have unless you ran into a hardcore fan.

Alvarez needs to win this fight and look good in doing so. He didn’t shine in his last fight against 40-year-old Shane Mosley last May. Alvarez won the fight with no problems, but he seemed frustrated and stressed with the pressure that Mosley kept putting on him. At times it looked like Alvarez was fighting with anger, as he would let lose with a flurry of shots, but Mosley calmly blocked many of them and took the few that got through. Mosley would then keep firing back with his own shots. Had Mosley been a little younger I have doubts that he would have beaten Alvarez quite easily. He showed how Alvarez doesn’t react well with pressure and a younger Mosley would have been faster with more power.



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