Canelo: I definitely rebounded from the Mayweather fight

By Boxing News - 03/09/2014 - Comments

canelo14By Chris Williams: Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (43-1-1, 31 KO’s) feels that his 10th round TKO win over Alfredo Angulo (22-4, 18 KO’s) last Saturday night was redemption for him from his humiliating defeat at the hands of Floyd Mayweather Jr. last September.

For Canelo, he sees himself as having proven that he’s learned from the loss to Mayweather, and that he’s improved his game. However, I’m really not so sure that a fighter as limited and as poor as Angulo is someone good enough for Canelo to make that kind of a statement about himself.

Personally, I’ve never seen Angulo look so bad before in a fight, and it has nothing to do with what Canelo was doing to him. Angulo just looked weak and slow. He’s always been slow, but the weak part was particularly disturbing and it has people going off in different directions in speculating about why Angulo lost all of his power for this one fight.

How do you go from being a puncher with excellent power to a guy that looked like he couldn’t punch his way out of a wet paper bag? I guess only Angulo knows the answer to that. But I do feel that Angulo was not the type of opponent that can answer the question of whether Canelo is a hype job created by Golden Boy Promotions based on wins over smaller, and often older welterweights rather than quality junior middleweights like Erislandy Lara.

“Tonight, I was the best fighter and definitely rebounded from the Mayweather fight with my performance,” Canelo said after the fight. “There’s a saying, ‘as long as you’ve learned, you didn’t lose.’ I learned a lot from that fight. Things didn’t go as planned. That’s in the past. We’re looking to the future. I stood in there and went toe-to-toe [with Angulo], because I didn’t feel his punches. I felt my punches to be stronger than him.”

I don’t see where Canelo can say he learned anything from the Mayweather fight because of how awful Angulo was. He was the bigger puncher than Angulo, but there was something definitely not right with Angulo’s power or lack thereof last Saturday night. After 25 fights where he showed excellent power, Angulo suddenly lost his power for the Canelo fight. Why? Who knows? But the power was definitely not there last night for Angulo.

For Canelo to say whether he learned from the loss to Mayweather, it’s going to take a very good opponent for him to know this. Having Golden Boy Promotions drag out a weakened Angulo for Canelo to fight proved little, other than that Canelo was able to beat a guy that was picked out especially for him to look good against.

It was rather telling last night when Canelo chose to dismiss Erislandy Lara when he came up to him at the post-fight press conference. Canelo told Lara that he’d have to wait. The question then is ‘wait for what?’ We’ve already seen Canelo fight Angulo, Kermit Cintron, Alfonso Gomez, Shane Mosley, Ryan Rhodes and Josesito Lopez. Does Lara have to wait for Canelo to fight more of these guys or is he simply not interested in taking the risk against the skillful Cuban. Whatever the case, Canelo really can’t say that he’s learned from his loss to Mayweather until he fights someone with a pulse that has a reasonable chance to beat him. I think it was academic going into last night’s fight that Angulo had zero chance of beating Canelo, and all he did last night was confirm that belief.



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