Salido to move up to 130, will be fighting in May

By Boxing News - 01/22/2013 - Comments

salido2By Dan Ambrose: Former WBO featherweight champion Orlando Salido (39-12-2, 27 KO’s) plans on moving up to super featherweight and will be fighting in May in Mexico, according to fightnews.com. Salido lost his WBO title to Mikey Garcia last Saturday night by an 8th round technical decision after a clash of heads in the 8th broke Mikey’s nose. The fight was allowed to go to the scorecards and Mikey was given an 8 round technical decision win.

Salido will be fighting a 10 round bout in May at super featherweight, after that he’ll reportedly be taking on WBO super featherweight champion Roman “Rocky” Martinez (26-1-2, 16 KO’s) in September. Martinez is coming off of a controversial 12 round draw against Juan Carlos Burgos last Saturday night on the same card as the Salido-Garcia fight. A lot of boxing fans felt that Burgos should have been given the decision due to his good body work in the fight.

Salido told Fightnews.com “I was going to dominate [Mikey] him in the last few rounds. I felt that his performance was going down.”

There’s no doubt about it that Salido was coming on from the 6th round on and Mikey was no longer hurting him due to his energy fading from the pressure that Salido was putting on him. Mikey had knocked Salido down four times earlier in the fight, but when Mikey was unable to stop Salido, he started to take more and more punishment from him from the 5th round on.

You have to remember that Mikey has a lot of early round knockouts on his resume, and he’s not used to fighting beyond the 6th round, especially against an opponent that is fighting back the way that Salido was. Mikey looked very uncomfortable in the 8th round and one could sense that he was going to have problems if the fight had gone another four rounds. He was taking big shots from Salido.

Mikey had a habit in the fight of pushing Salido’s head while backing away from him. You could hear the referee warning Mikey about this but it didn’t stop him from continuing to do this little trick every once in a while to keep Salido from getting in punching range.

You’re not supposed to be able to stick your glove out and shove your opponent when they’re coming forward because that’s not boxing, yet Mikey was allowed to use this tool to keep Salido from getting in position to land his shots. I think a lot of referees, such as Jay Nady, would have warned Mikey and then taken points away if he continued to use that trick, but the referee working the fight failed to take points away.



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