Geale expects Cotto to try and score an early KO

By Boxing News - 06/02/2015 - Comments

1-Cotto17By Dan Ambrose: Challenger Daniel Geale (31-3, 16 KOs) knows exactly what to expect of WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (39-4, 32 KOs) this Saturday in their fight on HBO World Championship Boxing.

Geale expects Cotto to come out quickly, show him zero respect, and try and score a quick knockout so that he can move forward to his big money fight against Saul “Canelo” Alvarez for later this year.

Geale says he’ not going to let Cotto stop him. He’s going to make sure he doesn’t give Cotto a chance to get off his huge bombs in the early rounds in order to drag the Puerto Rican into the second half of the fight where he hopes to drown him at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.

Cotto has a tendency to suffer cuts in the later rounds of his fights, and his face frequently swells up. Cotto’s stamina has never been good, but after a year out of the ring since his last fight in June of 2014, his stamina is likely to be even worse.

“I’m expecting an aggressive Cotto. I’m expecting a guy who’s not going to show me a lot of respect,” Geale said via Foxsports.com.au. “He’s going to come out hard and he’s going to be thinking that he’s going to stop me early but I’m going to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

Geale, 5’10”, will need to keep the shorter 5’7” Cotto on the outside to keep him from landing his left hooks and straight right hands. Cotto’s left hook is his best weapon by far. Geale can definitely handle getting hit by Cotto’s right hand, but it’s his left that he needs to worry most about.

Cotto hasn’t been hit a lot since his fight against Austin Trout three years ago in 2012. Geale could really puff up Cotto’s face if he can throw a lot of jabs in this fight and stay on the move. Cotto’s last two fights against a broken down Sergio Martinez and Delvin Rodriguez were straight up mismatches. Not surprisingly, Cotto didn’t get hit much in either fight. Martinez would have been a nightmare for Cotto if they’d fought in 2012 when Martinez still had two healthy legs and was fighting at a high level, but by the time Cotto got to him, Martinez was near 40, and a shell of his former self. This made it easy for Cotto to defeat him by a 10th round stoppage.

This Saturday’s Cotto-Geale fight will take place at a catch-weight of 157 pounds. Geale and his promoter Gary Shaw aren’t too happy with fighting at a catch-weight for a world title, but it’s what Cotto wanted. They feel that world title fights should traditionally be fought at the full weights rather than having catch-weights involved.

Unfortunately, until the sanctioning bodies put their foot down to stop the practice of champions looking to get an edge against their challengers with catch-weights, this kind of thing is going to persist. You don’t see catch-weights used in other sports like football, baseball, wrestling and basketball. It kind of takes away from the sport by making it look like it lacks regulation in my view.



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