What are the odds Saul Alvarez faces a weak opponent in December?

By Boxing News - 09/17/2012 - Comments

Image: What are the odds Saul Alvarez faces a weak opponent in December?(Photo credit: Alma Montiel) By Chris Williams: I have a bad feeling that Golden Boy Promotions are going continue to handle their fighter WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (41-0-1, 30 KO’s) with kid gloves by matching him against another soft touch in his upcoming December fight against an opponent still to be determined.

Alvarez, 22, just finished wiping out chubby welterweight Josesito Lopez in an easy 5th round TKO win last Saturday night at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. Thankfully the fight wasn’t pay per view, because that would have been said if boxing fans had to pay $50 to see that mismatch.

Alvarez has said that he’d like to fight Floyd Mayweather Jr. in December, but we know that’s not going to happen. Mayweather won’t bother fighting him because Alvarez hasn’t been fighting guys that would make him popular enough to where it would be worthwhile for Mayweather to fight him. I don’t blame Alvarez for that. That’s all on Golden Boy. They’re the ones matching Alvarez and not putting him in with the top guys in the division like Erislandy Lara and Vanes Martirosyan for some reason.

Here are Alvarez’s last seven opponents:

Josesito Lopez
Shane Mosley
Kermit Cintron
Alfonso Gomez
Matthew Hatton
Lovemore N’dou

You tell me if Alvarez deserves a huge payday against Mayweather after beating these guys. It’s not that Alvarez would be a bad fighter or anything like that for Mayweather, because he seems to be an excellent fighter. But what this soft match-making has done is slow down Alvarez’s ability to pick up new fans because he’s wiping out the fodder that Golden Boy is feeding him and boring fans at the same time. They need to step him up a couple of levels already or have him give up his World Boxing Council 154 pound strap so that a fighter can step in and face quality opposition instead of soft touches.

The available options for December are as follows:

Demetrius Andrade
Carlos Molina
James Kirkland

Miguel Cotto is busy with a fight already scheduled for December against Austin Trout. Mayweather isn’t interested in fighting Alvarez, because he’s still not a PPV fighter.

Look for Golden Boy to dip back into the welterweight division to find another smaller opponent for Alvarez to fight. My guess is Golden Boy stable fighter Marcos Maidana will be the one that gets selected for Alvarez, even though Maidana has pretty much established that he’s not the same fighter he once was now that he moved up to welterweight and isn’t able to overpower guys like he did at 140.



Comments are closed.