(Hogan Photos) By Dan Ambrose: Brian Campbell of ESPN sees WBA/WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (42-0-1, 30 KO’s) not as a typical Mexican fighter that comes forward to land hard body shots. Instead, Campbell pictures the 23-year-old Canelo as more of a counter-punching Juan Manuel Marquez type of fighter, and he thinks this style really gives Canelo his best chance of beating undefeated Floyd Mayweather Jr. (44-0, 26 KO’s) on September 14th.
Campbell said to ESPN “You have to question the [Austin] Trout fight because of the conditioning. He [Canelo] was counter punching so well with such hard punches, but he was unable to capitalize on certain opportunities, and really give you three hard minutes. The biggest thing you can say is he’s not really outstanding in any of these areas. His punching power is good, but he doesn’t have the top end speed. Although we’ve seen improvements in his defense, you can’t expect him to go in with a Mayweather and not expect him to get hit…Canelo is proving to be a lot more to be a counter puncher like Juan Manuel Marquez, and that’s going to be his best option because he doesn’t have the speed to go head to head.”
I think Campbell is right about Canelo being a counter puncher, and a much, much bigger version of Marquez. But I don’t believe counter punching is going to lead Canelo to victory against Mayweather. That’s going to get Canelo beat, because he’s slower, a lot slower than Mayweather, and he’s going to have all that extra weight on his 170+ pound frame slowing him down. You can’t expect a 170+ fighter to be faster than a speedy 150 lb. fighter.
The only reason Canelo was successful in counter punching against Austin Trout was because the wide scores that two of the judges gave after the 4th and 8th rounds with the open scoring for that fight, it forced Trout to go after Canelo. That’s not Trout’s fighting style. That was forced on him because two of the judges had Canelo winning almost every round of the fight.
I had Trout winning every round, because looked red-faced, and gassed out, but these two judges had Canelo up big after 8. There won’t be any open scoring in the Mayweather-Canelo fight, so Mayweather Jr. isn’t going to be forced to fight in an all-out way like Trout was. This means that if Canelo chooses to counter punch, then he’s going to be attempting to beat boxing’s best counter puncher in Mayweather. I just don’t see Canelo doing well fighting that kind of fight.
The only Canelo wins this fight is if he lower his head like a battering ram and charges forward every round and throws nonstop punches. This would definitely work IF Canelo could actually 3 minutes of every round without needing to take 2 minutes off to rest like he usually does, and IF Canelo could take all the big shots Mayweather would be hitting him with. I don’t think he could. Canelo is human after all, and if he gets hit with shots that he doesn’t see coming from Mayweather, he’ll go down like the red-haired Ricky Hatton did in 2007. Canelo would just be a bigger version of the red-haired Hatton.
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