Canelo to use left hooks to try and beat Trout on April 20th

By Boxing News - 03/05/2013 - Comments

canelo56By Dan Ambrose: WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (41-0-1, 30 KO’s), who WBA champion Austin Trout (26-0, 14 KO’s) sees as a slightly larger version of Miguel Cotto, plans on using some of Cotto’s ideas to try and beat Trout in their fight on April 20th at the Alamodome in San Antonio, Texas.

Specifically, Canelo thinks Trout is vulnerable to left hooks because Cotto was able to land those kinds of shots from time to time early in the fight before Trout adapted to what he was doing and dominated him badly for the last six rounds of the fight.

Canelo said to RingTV “I think it’s [throwing left hook’s] going to be one of the main points as I train for this fight. It’s going to be one of my best shots…against him.”

That makes sense because Canelo doesn’t have a lot of hand speed, and he has problems landing his right hands unless his opponents are standing still in front of him so he can land his shots. Canelo is much less accurate with his right hand when he’s dealing with movement, and that case he focuses on his left hook and jab to do almost all of his work.

Trout was able to neutralize Cotto’s left hooks by using movement and by standing at a distance to snap jabs into his face again and again. In the second half of the fight, Cotto’s left hand was basically useless to him because he wasn’t able to use it due to Trout not standing close enough for him to land the shot.

Canelo’s reach is just a little shorter than Trout’s on paper, but you rarely see Canelo extending his arms very far because he’s not that flexible, and he’s got the wrong kind of frame to be extending his arms far out in front of him to land jabs and long shots.

Canelo can only land when he’s in medium to close range so he can reach his opponents. This means that Trout is going to control the outside and he’ll be able to dominate the orange-haired Canelo all night long on April 20th.

In theory it’s a good idea for Canelo to follow what Cotto did against Trout, but in reality it’s not going to work for Canelo. It’s just going to make Trout’s job that much easier to beat him because he already figured out how to nullify the little tank-like Cotto’s style, and if Canelo is going to ape what Cotto was doing then he’s going to be making a huge mistake by showing Trout a style that he already knows how to beat.

It’s like giving Trout a test that he already passed expecting him to get a different result. That’s not going to happen. If anything, Trout will be even better the second time because he’s already seen the style and will know exactly what to do in order to shut down Canelo’s left hooks.



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