By Dan Ambrose: WBA junior middleweight champion Austin Trout (26-0, 14 KO’s) correctly points out that WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (41-0-1, 30 KO’s) won’t have a size advantage over him in their fight next month on April 20th like Canelo has typically enjoyed for pretty much all of his career.
There have been some exceptions now and then where Canelo wasn’t the taller fighter like in his bout with a past his best 5’11” Kermit Cintron in November 2011, but mostly it’s been Canelo fighting lighter and/or shorter guys than him.
Trout said as quoted by record.com.mx “I feel he [Canelo] has been with the weight advantage with many boxers who fought, so I’m going to put you in an uncomfortable place to see how it deals with that.”
Although Trout is listed as only one-half inch taller than the 5’9” Canelo, it’s clearly at least an inch, possibly an inch and a half more than that. When the two fighters have stood next to each other in their recent press conferences, you can see that Trout is the taller guy without a doubt, and he also seems to have a bigger frame.
The thing with Canelo is that his promoters at Golden Boy Promotions has matched him up with a lot of smaller guys for some strange reason rather than letting him fight guys in his own division. When Canelo was still able to fight at welterweight, we saw him fighting light welterweights like Jose Miguel Cotto and Lovemore Ndou, and now that Canelo is fighting at 154, we’re seeing him fighting welterweights like Matthew Hatton, Alfonso Gomez, Cintron, Shane Mosley, and Josesito Lopez.
Is that just an accident on Golden Boy’s part to consistently match Canelo against smaller guys or is that by design? I think it’s the latter. They’ve matched him against guys that Canelo could manhandle with his size, and kept away from fighters his own size or bigger.
It’s no secret that Golden Boy was not interested in making the Canelo vs. Trout fight because they saw Trout as difficult fight for Canelo, and obviously Trout’s size and athleticism are things that they were concerned with.
What will Canelo do once he realizes that he can’t squash the bigger Trout like he’s done against the smaller, less than impressive fighters Golden Boy has been feeding him all these years?
Will Canelo come apart mentally and start fouling or will he go wild trying to score a knockout? I don’t see anything coming from this fight for Canelo, and I suspect he’ll get dominated by Trout just like his brother Rigoberto Alvarez was two years ago.
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