Canelo: Marquez will beat Pacquiao

By Boxing News - 12/03/2012 - Comments

Image: Canelo: Marquez will beat PacquiaoBy Chris Williams: WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez is is throwing his 2 cents into this Saturday’s mega fight on HBO between Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Marquez at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. Canelo is picking the 39-year-old Marquez to come out on top in this fight, and believes that Marquez deserved wins in the last two fights he took part in against the Filipino fighter.

Canelo said to RingTV “I think it’s very difficult for Pacquiao to fight Marquez because of Marquez’s style…I think that Marquez is going to win. I think Marquez has won the last two fights.”

Before anyone says that Alvarez is merely picking Marquez because they’re both Mexican, I think it’s pretty obvious that Alvarez is making his choice not on nationality but on what took place in the ring. Alvarez doesn’t pick fighters mainly because of what country they come from. He’s a straight shooter, so if he believes that Marquez is going to smash Pacquiao on Saturday, then that’s what he believes in his heart that’s going to happen.

It comes down to which fighter is fighting at a high level, and which one looks like he’s starting to struggle with age and having lost a few steps. I think we’ve seen from Pacquiao’s last four fights that he’s deteriorating in the ring, and not the fighter he once was back between 2004 to 2009. All this talk about Pacquiao trying to find his old aggressiveness is really talk of trying to get Pacquiao back to his youth. Can a fighter do that?

I don’t know of any that have. You look at a young Muhammad Ali, and then compare him to how he looked when he was Pacquiao’s age at 34. Ali wasn’t the same, although he worked hard to try and get back to his early form. It just didn’t happen.

At 34 he wasn’t the same fighter. Marquez is a special case, though, because he seems to be aging at a slower pace compared to Pacquiao. I think a lot of that has to do with him not being so dependent on speed and ring movement the way that Pacquiao has been during his career. When fighters with blazing speed and ring movement start to age it’s often ugly because they struggle when they start getting hit a lot for the first time in their careers.



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