Erislandy Lara waiting for his shot at Canelo Alvarez

By Boxing News - 01/12/2014 - Comments

lara454By Dan Ambrose: Rather than take on the dangerous interim WBA light middleweight champion Erislandy Lara (19-1-2, 12 KO’s) next and risk getting schooled as badly as he did in his loss to Floyd Mayweather Jr., Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (42-1-1, 30 KO’s) is taking on the guy that Lara just knocked out in Alfredo Angulo (22-3, 18 KO’s) on March 8th at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.

In the meantime, the Cuban Lara is wondering when he’ll get a chance to face the red-headed Canelo so that he can collect his scalp in the same way that Mayweather Jr. did by giving the 23-year-old fighter a major boxing lesson that he won’t soon forget.

Lara suspects that Canelo is afraid of him, and that’s why he’s failed to fight him all these years. Lara has been chasing Canelo since 2010 without any luck in getting him in the ring. Golden Boy Promotions has been mostly busy feeding welterweights to Canelo one after another instead of having him fight the best junior middleweights like Lara.

“I hope that it happens, 100 percent…I hope that they work on it,” Lara said to RingTV. “But the reality is that if Canelo doesn’t fight me, then Canelo is scared. There are no ifs ands or buts about it. If Canelo doesn’t step up to the plate like he did against Austin Trout, then he’s a joke, plain and simple. He’s a joke.”

I hope for Lara’s sake he’s not interested in waiting around for Canelo, because the chances are very, very high that Golden Boy will not let Canelo get anywhere near Lara. He’s too similar to Mayweather with his fighting style, and he’d have too good of a chance of exposing the flat-footed Canelo the way that Mayweather did. Golden Boy wants to create Canelo into a big pay-per-view star, and that’s not going to happen if he keeps getting beaten.

As Angulo showed, Lara isn’t infallible. He can be hurt, and he can be knocked down if you hit him just right. But Canelo doesn’t like to get hit, and he tends to back off when he starts getting hit cleanly. The only way to beat Lara is to try and walk him down, take his shots the way that Angulo did, and fire back body punches. You have to focus on his body because he’s too hard to hit when you throw to his head. But Canelo is too slow, and much too timid about getting hit with head shots for him to do what Angulo was in the process of doing before getting halted by Lara in the 10th round.

I think Canelo is going to stay away from Lara all career long and instead keep his focus on fighting welterweights being pulled up to the junior middleweight division to fight him.



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