(Photo credit: Sumio Yamada) By Matthias Predonzan: In four months of post-fight comments and articles that followed Floyd Mayweather Jr vs. Marcos Maidana’s fight, one of the most debated topics was the style of fight that Mayweather “decided” to use against Maidana, for a good part of the fight, which is to stay toe-to toe with Maidana to give the fans what they wanted.
Personally I love fighters who are gifted from the technical point of view. I like to see fights where both the contenders are good boxers but I also appreciate fights where, in the classic clash of styles, a boxer and a puncher face each other.
I find very boring fights where the two opponents are punchers with limited boxing skills and basically the strategy of the fight is to try to knock-out the other fighter, regardless of the amount of punishment that this may cost.
Dialectically, offence and aggression are basic in boxing as the defensive skills are, and the spirit of modern boxing rewards as a winner the fighter who is able to score the most effective punches’ balance, not only to stop his contender.
Being a great admirer of Floyd Mayweather for the reasons above, I always enjoyed his fights because of his great technical skills and his ring generalship.
In his last fight against Maidana, I didn’t see the same brilliancy from Floyd, which we could admire in many of his past fights.
For the first part of the fight, Floyd suffered Maidana’s aggression and even if he won quite comfortably the fight, I wasn’t amazed from his performance.
Floyd said it was his choice to fight in this way to please the fans.
Well, if this is true, (I personally do not think so and I give credit to Maidana and Garcia to have forced Mayweather to fight their fight, at least for a part of the fight) I think that Floyd should take in account also the big number of boxing fans that want to see Mayweather footwork, timing and defense.
These are, since many years, his core fans and he has to respect them first and consider that without having been himself, from the boxing perspective, he would haven’t become the super-star of boxing he is now.
Mayweather fans expect to see Floyd to take command of the fight, to get the center of the ring, to make Maidana miss and miss and miss, as he did with Canelo.
The best Mayweather must take to school Maidana, not stay on the ropes to get forearmed and elbowed on the top of his head from a boxer with limited technical abilities.
We do not want to see a Maidana fight, we want to see a Mayweather show.
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