(Photo credit: Gene Blevins – Hoganphotos/Roc Nation Sports/Golden Boy Promotions) By Dan Ambrose: Former WBA/WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (45-1-1, 32 KOs) may have turned his career around with three straight wins since he defeat at the hands of Floyd Mayweather Jr. two years ago, but trainer Freddie Roach, who trains WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (40-4, 33 KOs), still sees Canelo as lazy and someone with questionable stamina.
The young 25-year-old Canelo worked out at one of Roach’s gyms not too long ago, and Roach says he had reports that Canelo was lazy. I don’t know if this is something that can be changed. Usually when a fighter is lazy, they tend to stay that way rather than grow out of it.
“I wasn’t really impressed with Kirkland’s performance that night,” Roach said via thaboxingvoice.com. “But Canelo did what he was supposed to do. We need to break him down early, work the body, and then take over late because his condition isn’t that good. He trained in one of my gyms (Wild Card West), and I didn’t always get good reports. He was a little bit lazy at times.”
I do think that Roach is right in going after Canelo’s body because Austin Trout hurt Canelo with a body shot in their fight in April 2013, and Canelo retreated to the ropes and spent pretty much the entire second half of the fight with his back against the ropes. Some of that was obviously from the body shot that Trout landed, but another part likely was the result of Canelo not having the stamina to fight off the ropes.
The problems with Canelo’s stamina would tie in with him not going enough work in training canp to have the stamina to work hard for the full three minutes of every round. But in Canelo’s case, he was againt the ropes almost the entire second half of the fight against Trout. I think that was a case of Canelo not having the conditioning to fight hard.
“We have hard preparation ahead of us, but we will be ready and Cotto will win by knockout,” Roach said.
Roach might be right in predicting a knockout for Cotto. If Canelo is as lazy as Roach says he is, then I think there’s a good chance that the hard working Cotto will outwork Canelo, hurt him to the body, and either finish him off with another body shot or come up stairs to blast him out with a hard head shot. James Kirkland had Canelo stunned in their fight last May. If Kirkland could hurt Canelo, then Cotto can definitely hurt him as well.
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