By Paul Richardson: After Miguel Cotto’s very impressive 10th round stoppage victory over a clearly injured WBC middleweight champion Sergio Martinez last Saturday night at Madison Square Garden in New York, a lot of talk has centered around a potential Cotto vs. Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (43-1-1, 31 KO’s) match up. This would probably be a great fight, but in fact is quite unlikely to happen as Alvarez is very likely to be on the wrong end of a beat-down from the Cuban amateur stand-out Erislandy Lara in their fight next month on July 12th at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Alvarez’s strengths lie mainly in his punching power, which works well when facing come-forward swarmers like Alfredo Angulo, who are going to allow you to find a home for your big punches on a regular basis, but against a slick boxer like Lara Alvarez is likely to be made to look silly. This happened in September of last year when he lost a 12 round wide decision against a clearly faded Floyd Mayweather Jr, who went on to struggle badly with barely B-level Marcos Maidana in their recent fight last May.
A lot of people have pointed out that Angulo had his moments against Lara, whereas Canelo had a relatively easy time, but styles make fights, and whereas Angulo has the style to trouble an out and out boxer like Lara, Canelo’s low volume slugging style is unlikely to have to make Lara break much of a sweat.
Lara also seems very prepared for this fight. He recently said that we are going to see ‘the best Erislandy Lara. We are going to take him to school’. I don’t doubt it, and Canelo is going to soon find out that punching very hard matters very little when all you can punch is the air around someones head.
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