Cotto says Roach is his best weapon to defeat Canelo

By Boxing News - 08/29/2015 - Comments

Image: Cotto says Roach is his best weapon to defeat CaneloBy Dan Ambrose: WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (40-4, 33 KOs) is full of confidence ahead of his title defense against Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (45-1-1, 32 KOs) on November 21st at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The person who has helped instill that confidence is his 55-year-old trainer Freddie Roach, who has fine-tuned Cotto’s game and put a sharp focus on the tools that made him one of the best fighters in the sport. Roach didn’t add any new tools to Cotto’s already full toolkit. Instead, Roach has helped Cotto define the right tools for the job each time he fights.

For the Cotto-Canelo fight, Roach already knows what tools the 34-year-old Cotto needs to hand Canelo his second defeat of his career in their fight on HBO pay-per-view.

Cotto believes that his best weapon for the job of beating the upstart Canelo is Roach. With the expert guidance that Cotto will be getting from Roach, he feels 100 percent that he’ll be walking out of the Mandalay Bay arena the victor on November 21st.

“Freddie is the person responsible for Miguel Cotto regaining his career,” said Cotto via Fightnews.com. “My best weapon to defeat Alvarez is called Freddie Roach. He has brought me to fight with great quality again and at 34 years of age, I’m doing things that I never thought I could do.”

Under Roach’s watch, Cotto is 3-0, with wins over Delvin Rodriguez, Sergio Martinez and Daniel Geale. Cotto knocked all three of those fighters out in impressive victories for the Puerto Rican star. If you compare how Cotto fought before Roach took over to the way he’s fighting now, it’s like night and day. Cotto’s two fights before Roach joined up, he lost to Austin Trout and Floyd Mayweather Jr.

While there’s no shame in losing to a fine fighter like Mayweather, Cotto did not fight well at all in losing to Trout. Cotto’s confidence looked completely shot for that fight in December 2012, and he fought a really poor fight. It would be interesting to see how Cotto would fight against Trout right now at this point in his career.

Cotto is obviously not going to waste his time fighting Trout again because the two fighters have gone in opposite directions since that bout with Trout losing to Canelo and Erislandy Lara. But it would still be of great interest to see how Cotto would do against Trout right now given the great strides that Cotto has made with his career with Roach’s help.

It’s going to be really tough for Canelo to deal with Cotto now because he’s using his left hook and jab like never before. In the past, Cotto had gotten away from those two weapons and was putting too much of an emphasis on his right hand. Cotto has a good right hand, but his best weapons are his jab and left hook to control his fights.

Canelo is going to be having a lot of problems dealing with Cotto’s power and his jab in this fight. I think it’s going to go really badly for the 25-year-old fighter unless he shows some kind of improvement from what we’ve seen from him in the last two years.

The difference between Cotto now and how he was before adding Roach to his team is the self confidence that he now possesses. Cotto believes totally in his mind that he can win each time he enters the ring. In the past, I don’t think Cotto had that. He wasn’t possessed with the belief that he could win each time he fought. Now you’re seeing a much different Cotto. That’s bad news for Canelo, because he’s running into Cotto at the wrong point in his career. It would have been better for Canelo to have fought Cotto in 2012, when he was struggling and at a low point with his losses to Mayweather and Trout.

There are a lot of question marks around whether Canelo can take a hard shot from a big puncher like Cotto without getting hurt. We saw Canelo hurt in his last fight by James Kirkland last May. If Kirkland was able to hurt Canelo, then there’s an excellent chance that Cotto will do the same thing but worse when he gets him inside the ring on November 21st in Las Vegas, Nevada.



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