Cotto vs. Canelo to take place in October or November

By Boxing News - 06/08/2015 - Comments

1-cotto (13)By Dan Ambrose: Former WBA/WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (45-1-1, 32 KOs) and WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (40-4, 33 KOs) will be facing each other in October or November, according to Dan Rafael.

This isn’t the date that the 24-year-old Canelo wants to fight on, however. Canelo has insisted over and over again that he plans on taking the Mexican dates – in May and September – for himself rather than letting Floyd Mayweather Jr. to claim them.

Canelo feels that a Mexican fighter should be fighting on the Mexican holidays. Unfortunately for Canelo, Mayweather is likely to fight on September 12th on Showtime PPV, and the promoters and HBO are going to let Mayweather take the date rather than trying to compete with him by staging a PPV fight on the same night between Canelo and Cotto.

It would be foolhardy for those two fighters to try and compete with Mayweather, because their fight would likely receive far fewer PPV buys that Mayweather’s. With Mayweather, he’ll get huge money due to his PPV contract with Showtime. It doesn’t matter if his fight takes in fewer PPV buys, because he’s going to make big money due to it being the last fight of his six-fight contract.

With Cotto and Canelo, they need big PPV buys for them to make good money. That obviously won’t happen if Mayweather fights on the same night on Showtime PPV. I would venture to guess that a good portion of the casual boxing fans would opt to watch Mayweather’s fight rather than the Cotto-Canelo bout.

“They would prefer to go on September 12th, which is of course the weekend of the Mexican Independence Day,” Dan Rafael said via ESPN.com. “That’s the day Canelo would like to go, but that’s also the date when Floyd Mayweather going on his next fight in his last fight of his Showtime contract. The promoters and HBO have said that ‘if this is when Floyd is going, we’re not going to fight that battle. We’re doing with that. Let Floyd do what he wants to do what he wants to do, and we’ll go some other time.’ So they’re going to wait until the official announcement of the Mayweather fight, but they’re looking sometime in October, perhaps in early November.”

The Cotto vs. Canelo fight promises to be an excellent bout if Canelo can apply enough pressure on Cotto to make it entertaining. Cotto likes to box when he faces punchers, as we saw in his fights against Antonio Margarito, Ricardo Mayorga and Manny Pacquiao. Those guys all gave Cotto all kinds of problems with the pressure that they put on him. Canelo will need to do the same thing for him to have a chance of beating Cotto. He can’t let him dance around the ring looking to jab and pot shot him all night long.

I doubt that Cotto will try and slug with Canelo because he busts up easy due to the scar tissue around his eyes. If Canelo can get Cotto bleeding like Pacquiao and Joshua Clottey did, we could see Cotto get taken apart. Even Cotto’s trainer Freddie Roach wouldn’t be able to save him in this case. That’s why it’s very likely that Cotto will be dancing around the ring throwing mostly jabs and single power shots all night long.



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