By Dan Ambrose: Trainer Robert Garcia says that his fighter Marcos Maidana (35-4, 31 KOs) is going to be putting constant pressure on WBA/WBC welterweight champion Floyd Mayweather Jr (46-0, 26 KOs) for the full 12 rounds in order to wear him down and hurt him in their September 13th rematch at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Garcia says that Maidana will be in better shape for this fight than in Mayweather-Maidana I, and that the better conditioning will enable Maidana to work the 37-year-old Mayweather down to punish him.
“We’re going to out for the kill. We’re going to mess him [Mayweather] up bad, and we are. Bad,” Garcia said to esnewsreporting.com. “12 rounds of nothing but action, pressure, and throwing a lot of punches. 12 rounds of that. This one will be even better [than the first fight], I guarantee you that.”
It’s difficult to imagine that Maidana will be able to put any additional pressure on Mayweather than he did the last time they fought, because Maidana looked like he pretty much maxed out in that fight in terms of putting pressure on Maidana was on top of Mayweather for the full 12 rounds. But for all the pressure that Maidana put on Mayweather, he still ended up losing the fight by a 12 round majority decision.
The pressure that Maidana put on Mayweather was dumb pressure, ineffective pressure, with many shots being thrown and missed badly. Maidana can put that pressure on Mayweather again, but we’re going to likely see the same results unless Maidana improves his accuracy and stops loading up with so many wild shots, especially the looping ones. Maidana was like a broken record last May.
Maidana started off throwing looping shots, and continued to throw them even when Mayweather made adjustments to block or dock the punches. The second half of the fight was largely Mayweather making Maidana miss virtually all of his looping shots. I wouldn’t be surprised if Maidana’s connect percentage was in the teens in the last half of the action, because he was just wildly throwing home run punches, and looking amateurish with his swings and misses.
Saul “Canelo” Alvarez did the same thing in his “win” over Erislandy Lara, but Maidana was far worse with the way he kept swinging for the fences with his punches and missing badly.
Garcia knows that Maidana has to put unrelenting pressure on Mayweather to have a chance of improving. But he needs to be sitting him down and teaching him to straighten out his shots and mix in more body punches, because Mayweather has already figured out how to neutralize Maidana’s favorite punches, the looping shots.
If Maidana goes out there on September 13th and tries to catch Mayweather with those punches all night, he’s likely to lose every round of the fight unless he gets lucky and knocks him out with one of his looping rabbit shots. Even then, the knockout might not count if the referee is on his job and sees that Mayweather was KO’d by a punch to the back of the head instead of a legal one.
Comments are closed.