By Dan Ambrose: 33-year-old Miguel Cotto is about to make a huge mistake in attempting to capture a 4th division world title against WBC middleweight champion Sergio Martinez on June 7th at Madison Square Garden. You can kind of see why Cotto is selecting Sergio to fight instead of taking on the younger Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and getting a payday of $10 million+ for the fight.
Sergio is about to turn 39, he’s coming off of a poor performance against Martin Murray in which he probably should have lost, and he’s starting to have problems with reoccurring injuries. In addition to that, Sergio isn’t as popular as the red-haired Canelo, meaning that Cotto can use his better popularity to get what he wants out of the negotiations in terms of a bigger purse, the venue for the fight, and most likely a catch-weight that benefits him.
Cotto would have a harder time doing those things with the popular Canelo, because he’s arguably already a bigger star than Cotto is even a 33.
But where Cotto is making a huge mistake is him probably thinking that Sergio will be slowed with his injury problems, old and able to move around the ring like he did several years ago. By the time they face each other on June 7th, Sergio will have been out of the ring for the past 14 months and that time off will no doubt work in his favor.
All of Sergio’s injuries will have healed by then and he’ll be able to move like he had before his big fight against Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. last year in September. Sergio was fast and quick on his feet against Julio.
Cotto can’t beat a guy like Sergio, not with him using speed and movement to avoid Cotto’s left hooks. It doesn’t matter that Cotto has a new trainer in Freddie Roach and that he supposedly has brought him back to where he was years earlier.
Sergio is likely going to expose Cotto in the same way that Floyd Mayweather Jr., Austin Trout, Manny Pacquiao and Antonio Margarito did by giving him a real pounding in this fight.
Cotto is a good fighter if you don’t have a great chin, and if you stand directly in front of him for 12 rounds. But he’s very limited and almost helpless if you use movement. We saw that with his fight against Austin Trout.
Cotto couldn’t set up his offense and land his big left hooks because Trout kept moving and boxing him from the outside. That’s obviously what Sergio will be doing on June 7th to dominate Cotto.
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