Roach believes he’s helped improve Miguel Cotto

By Boxing News - 10/01/2013 - Comments

cotto21312By Dan Ambrose: Trainer Freddie Roach has the tough task of trying to resurrect Miguel Cotto’s failing career. Roach is the latest of the trainer’s that Cotto has signed up with, and it’s possible that we could see Roach gone as well if he’s not able to magically bring the aging soon to be 33-year-old Cotto back to his glory days before the beating he took from Antonio Margarito in their first fight in 2008.

Roach believes he’s brought about improvement in Cotto’s game. How much improvement he’s not saying, but it’s likely that the improvement is negligible and not enough to have Cotto beating the likes of Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, Floyd Mayweather Jr. or Austin Trout.

For now, Roach is just hoping that Cotto will defeat this Saturday’s opponent Delvin Rodriguez (28-6-3, 16 KO’s) in their fight on HBO from the Amway Center, in Orlando, Florida, USA. If Cotto loses that fight, it’ll be his 3rd straight defeat and a pretty good indication that it’s all over for him.

Cotto can change trainers if he wishes at that point, but it’s not likely change anything as long as he’s focused on wanting to fight the best in the game. Rodriguez is a contender, but he’s definitely not the best. That’s why it’s going to be very bad for Cotto if he beaten up by Rodriguez on Saturday.

Roach said to the WBC “He’s a very committed fighter. He has a great will to do everything. I won’t change his style, but I’ve been able to help him significantly improve.”

Roach should say that he ‘hopes’ that he’s helped Cotto improve significantly because you can’t quantify how much you’ve helped a fighter without them having fought a series of good opponents. You only measure your performance down the road after a certain amount of fights. This isn’t like bowling where you can see improvement in your game immediately by the higher scores you’re putting up.

Now if Cotto were to destroy Rodriguez, beat Trout and thrash Canelo, then you can say that Roach has probably improved Cotto’s game. But until Cotto has done that, Roach is just talking himself up without any proof.

I find it highly unlikely that Cotto will destroy Rodriguez, and I doubt that he’ll ever be good enough to beat Trout if they ever fight again, which I don’t think they will after how easily Trout handled Cotto last December.

The mostly likely opponent we’ll see Cotto fighting in early 2014 will be Canelo. The money is too good for Cotto walk away from a fight like that, and we’ll get a chance to see how brilliant of a trainer that Roach is.

He’ll have to be incredibly good for Canelo to get through a hulking junior middleweight like Canelo. Cotto’s best chance of beating Canelo is to push for a 152 lb. catch-weight for the fight like the one Canelo had against Mayweather recently, and use that to gain a slight advantage.

Given that Canelo would be draining down from the 170s to get to 152, Cotto would have a good chance of beating him as long as he didn’t stand directly in front of the red-haired Canelo for 12 rounds.

Rodriguez could mess things up for Cotto on Saturday with his power shots and his pressure. Rodriguez has excellent power, and he does a really good job of beating down fighters that come forward looking to slug it out.

Rodriguez showed this in his wins over Pawel Wolak, Freddy Hernandez and George Tahdooahnippah recently. Those guys came to try and punch with Rodriguez, and he made each of them pay with his hard power shots.



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