By Dan Ambrose: Former WBA junior middleweight champion Austin Trout (26-2, 14 KO’s) lost a disappointing 12 round unanimous decision last Saturday night to Erislandy Lara (19-1-2, 12 KO’s) at the Barclays Center, in Brooklyn, New York, USA. For Trout, this was his second consecutive loss after having been beaten by Saul “Canelo” Alvarez earlier this year. But what makes this defeat so much tougher on Trout was how easily he was beaten by Lara.
Trout didn’t take a bad beating or anything close to that, but he was definitely out-boxed by Lara. The judges scores showed that pretty clearly with Lara getting the victory by the scores of 118-109, 117-110, 117-110.
Trout said after the fight “I’m coming back. Who can say that they fought such high caliber fighters as Cotto, Canelo and Lara back to back to back? His style was tricky, but I don’t sign up for easy fights.”
For Trout to succeed against the quicker fighters like Lara he’s going to have to go after them by throwing a lot of shots, and he needs to be willing to mix it up. Trout can’t beat these kinds of fighters flicking jabs at his waist and throwing an occasional hook. If he Sergey Kovalev type of power then he could fight this way, but he doesn’t. Trout needs to be able to take things to another gear against the quick fighters without big power. Trout needs to be able to adapt his fights and come up with a plan B, C and D. Against Canelo, Trout had only made one change in his game by going from boxing mode to the slugging mode. That didn’t work, at least not with the three judges that was working the fight. Trout needed to go into plan C, which would involve him going in and throwing fast 3-4 punch combinations against the slower Canelo. That would have worked a lot better than Trout coming in and throwing one shot and then moving away.
Golden Boy needs to give Trout a few confidence boosters to bring him back to where he was before his losses to Canelo and Lara. Trout would do good against guys like Delvin Rodriguez, Yuri Foreman, Ishe Smith or Carlos Molina. Those guys are the types that Trout shines against and I could see him beating all of them easily. Once he picks up 2-3 victories, Trout needs to be matched tough again and put in with Lara and Canelo for rematches. I think he’d do a lot better the second time around.
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