Sergio Martinez not worried about Chavez Jr’s weight advantage or a small ring

By Boxing News - 07/11/2012 - Comments

Image: Sergio Martinez not worried about Chavez Jr's weight advantage or a small ringBy Dan Ambrose: Former WBC middleweight champion Sergio Martinez (49-2-2, 28 KO’s) doesn’t care how heavy WBC middleweight champion Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. (46-0-1, 32 KO’s) comes in for their fight on September 15th.

Martinez says he doesn’t care whether the fight will take place in a small ring, and he doesn’t care about the judges possibly giving Chavez Jr. a gift decision. Martinez plans on knocking Chavez Jr. and removing any doubt who the better fighter is at middleweight.

Martinez said this as quoted by RingTV “No [not worried about small ring], it’s less room for him [Chavez Jr] to run.”

Martinez also isn’t worried about Chavez Jr’s likely 20 pound weight advantage in this fight, saying “I’ll have more body to punch.”

Indeed, Chavez Jr’s size may work against him in this fight because he’ll be a lot slower than the quick-footed Martinez without being the bigger puncher. It’s never good when you’ve got a fighter that is bigger like Chavez Jr. but who still can’t punch as hard as someone 20 pounds lighter like Martinez.

What happens then is that Chavez Jr. will have to take lot of heavy shots from Martinez in order to land his punches, and if he can’t catch up to Martinez on regular basis, we could have a big mismatch here. Martinez has the kind of power to knock a fighter out cold if they don’t play it safe against him. The guys that have lasted until the later rounds recently – Darren Barker and Matthew Macklin – were able to do this by boxing Martinez rather than slugging with him.

It’s unclear how big the ring size will be for this fight, but since Chavez Jr. is the champion, he’ll likely be able to dictate the size of the ring so that it’s as small as possible for him to be able to try and corner Martinez. That could work against him because Martinez is so much faster and Chavez Jr. has no head movement or the ability to block punches. Chavez Jr. will be depending on his head to be able to block Martinez’s best shots. I don’t think he’s going to do well getting hit by Martinez cleanly all night.



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