Canelo with too many advantages for Cotto to deal with

By Boxing News - 07/04/2015 - Comments

canelo90By Allan Fox: WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto’s trainer Freddie Roach has a lot of boxing fans convinced that he singlehandedly resurrected the 34-year-old Cotto’s career with his training techniques by having him use more left hooks and focusing more on his power than before.

Other boxing fans believe the only thing that’s changed in Cotto is he’s been matched up against three consecutive weak fighters in the past two years. This is all going to change in November when Cotto steps inside the ring with Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (45-1-1, 32 KOs) of Mexico in a fight that will very likely be televised in Las Vegas, Nevada on November 21st.

Canelo is obviously a flawed fighter when matched against pure boxers like Floyd Mayweather Jr., Austin Trout and Erislandy Lara. But the type of guys that Canelo always does well against a punchers like Cotto. Canelo was brought up with that fighting style in Mexican, where he faced countless sluggers both in real fights and in sparring sessions.

Canelo knows how to beat sluggers, and that’s kind of what Cotto is. He can box a little, but not a lot. Cotto’s trainer Freddie Roach is probably going to have him trying to box a lot against Canelo because he’s got to know that Cotto has too much ring wear, too much scar tissue, and too many flaws in his game for him to stand up to 12 hard rounds against a guy 10 years younger than him with better hand speed and equally good power.

Canelo has too many advantages in this fight for Cotto to try and stand in the pocket with him for any length of time. Canelo’s superior hand speed and size is going to give Cotto a major amount of problems in this fight, and I’m not sure that he can handle all the things that Canelo has going for him.

Cotto is going to have to try and stay on the outside as much as possible in this fight because each time he stops to try and exchanges, he’s going to get hit hard and he’s going to get hit often.

Cotto will start to break down physically the more that he tries to trade with Canelo, and I see it going badly for him. I think this fight is going to wind up being a lot like the first fight between Cotto and Antonio Margarito where Cotto ran around the ring for the first nine rounds before stopping in the 10th to try and stand up and fight. Margarito quickly hurt Cotto with some hard shots that had Cotto bleeding.

In the 11th round, Margarito finished Cotto off with a series of hard blows that led to Cotto taking a knee and getting stopped. I don’t think for a second that Margarito had anything in his gloves in that fight. He won because he was so relentless with his punches, and he never stopped attacking and he eventually wore Cotto.

Even in the rematch, we saw Margarito starting up late in the fight just like he did in their previous encounter. Luckily for Cotto, Margarito’s surgically repaired eye closed up enough for the ringside doctor to halt the fight because otherwise I think we would have seen Cotto gets stopped again.



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