By Dan Ambrose: On January 19th, undefeated Miguel Angel “Mikey” Garcia (30-0, 26 KO’s) says he plans on fighting WBO featherweight champion Orlando Salido (39-11-2, 27 KO’s) in the same calm manner that he’s been fighting his other opponents during his six-year pro career when the two of them meet up at Madison Square Garden, New York, New York, USA.
Garcia said “I know that I have to be very smart and very patient in the ring.”
In other words, Mikey plans on fighting in the same slow, robotic manner that he’s been fighting. It looks like Mikey doesn’t plan on throwing any more punches than he usually does and that’s going to be a problem because Salido isn’t the type of fighter that you can sit back against and throw pot shots every 10 to 20 seconds.
Garcia is one of those cerebral fighters that sits back for long periods of time before he lets loose with a bomb. He can punch hard but he doesn’t throw enough punches, and his power isn’t that much better than Salido’s. Unless Garcia can let his hands go a lot more in this fight than he’s done against the weak opposition that’s been fed to him by his promoters, it’s going to be bad for him.
Garcia stepped it up somewhat in his last fight against Jonathan Victor Barros, and he got hit a lot in that fight was bruised up at the time he was able to finally halt Barros. If not for that knockout punch by Mikey, it might have been really bad for him because he was really exposed in that fight. Garcia came into that fight looking invincible against the 2nd and 3rd tier opposition he’d been facing, but he ended up getting tagged countless times by Barros.
The problem that Mikey had in that fight was that he simply wouldn’t throw enough punches. He was just looking for pot shots the entire night. It was a like a homerun hitter with a 200 average, refusing to lighten up on his swings to raise his average and to stay in the league.
Mikey would throw a big shot, and then get tagged bunch of times, and then he would throw another single shot. It was sad because Mikey’s got Robert Garcia training him and you’d think he’d have learned more skills than he showed. I blame that on the weak opposition he’s been put in with. It’s enabled Garcia to pick up bad habits where he tries to knock his opponents out with single shots and doesn’t throw combinations.
I expect Salido to badly school Garcia in this fight and beat him badly. I just hope Garcia learns how to fight after this loss because you can spend your career facing weak guys and not learning how to fight properly to beat the better fighters.
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