Saul Alvarez’s next opponent expected to be announced this week

By Boxing News - 02/11/2013 - Comments

alvarez43By Dan Ambrose: Golden Boy Promotions could be announcing who WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo”Alvarez (41-0-1, 30 KO’s) will be fighting next this week. However, Golden Boy won’t be announcing who Floyd Mayweather Jr. will be fighting next unfortunately, and that’s the fighter that the boxing public is more interested in.

Canelo will be the co-main event on Mayweather’s undercard on May 4th at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. It’s still not clear who Canelo will be facing, but most boxing insiders believe WBA World junior middleweight champion Austin Trout will be the one that gets the fight.

It would be pretty shocking if Golden Boy matches Canelo up with James Kirkland or Alfredo Angulo instead of Trout, but that would be a move that would be done in order to ensure Canelo doesn’t take a loss before he lays some golden eggs for Golden Boy in facing Mayweather in a mega fight next September.

Trout vs. Canelo could be a disaster for Canelo and for Golden Boy if Trout takes him to school, and exposes him as a limited flat-footed fighter with poor stamina. It’s certainly possible because Canelo has looked vulnerable even against the smaller, older and less talented fighters that Golden Boy has been feeding him his entire career.

Canelo has a lot of fights on his resume, but none against anyone good. He fought Shane Mosley, but he was 40-years-old and way past his prime.

A young Mosley would have likely beaten Canelo without any problems, but in facing an old Mosley, he had nothing to worry about. The remainder of Canelo’s opposition has mediocre. So it’s going be a tough test for Canelo to suddenly be facing someone that can actually fight at a high level, and who is fights at 154 instead of 147.

It’ll be good that Canelo is finally tested for once because if he doesn’t pass the test, boxing fans can categorize him as hype and move onto legit fighters that aren’t being matched carefully, and who really can fight.

A loss for Canelo might mean that he doesn’t belong at 154, and that he should be fighting at 147, so he can have a weight advantage over his opponents like former WBC middleweight champion Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. typically does when he fights at middleweight.



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