(Photo credit: Esther Lin/Showtime) By Dan Ambrose: This Saturday night Floyd Mayweather Jr. (45-0, 26 KO’s) will be fighting Marcos Maidana (35-3, 31 KO’s) in a 12 round unification match at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Mayweather sees Maidana as being a much different fighter than his last opponent Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, who Mayweather easily beat last September by a 12 round decision in Las Vegas, Nevada. Mayweather says he sees Canelo as being a similar fighter to him, whereas he sees Maidana as being more of a classic slugger that comes straight at his opponents looking to punch their lights out.
“Canelo is a little bit different [than Maidana] technique-wise,” Mayweather said. “Canelo is a strong, solid boxer, whereas Maidana is kind of a face first combatant. With Canelo, he likes to take his time, box, be smart, and break down his opponent down. Canelo kind of reminds me of myself. There’s a lot of pressure on Maidana. I think he’s going to come out and fight his heart out.”
It’s quite possible that Maidana will do a lot better against Mayweather than Canelo did, mainly because Maidana won’t waste time trying to box Mayweather the way that Canelo did. In watching the Mayweather-Canelo fight, it was pretty clear that Canelo wasted most of the fight trying to box with Mayweather using the shoulder roll defense instead of utilizing his huge 20lb weight advantage over Mayweather to try and crush him.
Canelo came into the fight as big as a large super middleweight, and yet Canelo failed to use his size and strength to try and hurt Mayweather. Maidana isn’t going to make that same mistake that Canelo did, because he’s already seen that approach fail with Robert Guerrero and Canelo.
Miguel Cotto gave Mayweather all kinds of problems because he went after him with pressure from round one, and hit him with everything he had with each punch he threw. Had Cotto not run out of gas after the 8th round, we might have seen him squeak out a decision. But Canelo failed to learn from watching the Mayweather-Cotto fight, and instead he tried to beat Mayweather by boxing with him.
Maidana will come after Mayweather the way that Cotto did, but he’ll be looking to improve upon the performance that Cotto put in. Cotto couldn’t throw a lot of punches without needing a breather. Maidana is capable to putting a lot more pressure on than Cotto due to his excellent stamina, and so he’s going to likely do a better job than Cotto and Canelo against Mayweather. We night even see an upset if Maidana doesn’t run out of gas like he did in his last fight against Adrien Broner in the last couple of rounds.
“I’m not looking for the fight to go the distance,” Mayweather said. “That’s why I’m saying this fight will likely be a toe-to-toe battle. I’m sure he wants to knock me out, and I want to give the fans a knockout.”
Mayweather is going to need to go to the body a lot for him to get a knockout against Maidana, because that seems to be the one area where he’s most vulnerable.
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