Maidana plans on wearing Mayweather down with shots to his arms and shoulders

By Boxing News - 09/11/2014 - Comments

Floyd Mayweather and Marcos Maidana(Photo credit: Esther Lin/Showtime) By Chris Williams: Taking a page out of the old playbook of Rocky Marciano, Marcos Maidana (35-4, 31 KOs) plans on trying to tire WBA/WBC welterweight champion Floyd Mayweather Jr (46-0, 26 KOs) out with punches to his arms and shoulder areas to make them too heavy for him to hold up to protect himself adequately this Saturday in their Showtime pay-per-view fight starting at 7 p.m. ET.

Marciano, a fighter with heavy hands, likely to throw hard shots to his opponent’s shoulders and arms to wear them down. Like Maidana, Marciano also threw a lot of looping shots that would connect sometimes to the back of his opponents’ heads which made him all the more dangerous to deal with.

“I’m going to hit him in the shoulder. I’m going to hit him in the arms, and come eighth, ninth round he’s going to be so tired from all the punches that he’s not going to be able to defend himself anymore,” Maidana said.

This is a strategy that has only design and that’s for Maidana to score a knockout. He’s not going to win rounds punching the shoulders and the arms of Mayweather, and I’m not sure that Maidana even sees himself capable of winning a lot of rounds.

By now, Maidana has got to realize that Mayweather is going to be looking to clown him on Saturday night in the same way that Sugar Ray Leonard clowned Robert Duran in their rematch. Maidana is going to get a boxing lesson unless he can somehow come up a good strategy to try and knock Mayweather out.

Hitting Mayweather in the arms and shoulder might be about as good a strategy that you can think up, because Maidana probably won’t have much luck trying to land his head shots. But even if Maidana does wear Mayweather’s arms down by punching him on them, he’s still going to need to figure out how to him in the head.

Mayweather is good at moving his head backwards to avoid punches by bending backwards. Maidana will to throw to the body more if he wants to get Mayweather to bend forward so that his head is within reach.

I don’t see Maidana as being able to wear Mayweather down enough with arm and shoulder punches to score a knockout in this fight because it’s going to take too long for that to happen, and by then we’ll likely see Mayweather score a knockout with a body punch.

I think that’s what Mayweather’s game plan is for the rematch on Saturday. You can see that with the way he’s been working the heavy back and the body armor that his assistant trainer has been wearing for his workouts.



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