Broner visits Roach: Is he dumping Stafford as trainer?

By Boxing News - 10/22/2015 - Comments

1-LR_BRONERALLAKHVERDIEV-PRESSER-1819By Tim Fletcher:
Newly crowned WBA World light welterweight champion Adrien Broner (31-2, 23 KOs) shocked a lot of boxing fans recently when he made a surprise visit to trainer Freddie Roach’s Wildcard Gym in Los Angeles, California.

The visit came out of nowhere, and immediately people began to speculate that the 26-year-old Broner might be kicking around the idea of dumping his long-time trainer and going with a better known guy like Roach to help guide his career and take him to the next level.

Stafford doesn’t think that Broner is in the process of dumping him for Roach, saying to Michael Woods at RingTV.com “Everybody loves Adrien. He’s just playing around in that picture,” Stafford said. “Don’t believe the hype, AB is staying home.”

I wouldn’t be so sure of that if I was Stafford. Broner clearly has a number of holes in his game that need to be fixed, and I don’t see there being any improvement from fight to fight. Even in his last fight against Khabib Allakhverdiev, Broner still looked like the same fighter that was beaten by Marcos Maidana and Shawn Porter.

Broner is still not throwing enough punches, still pot-shotting, still using the shoulder roll, and still not moving enough around the ring. I think it’s clear that Broner needs to make a change at the trainer position at this point in his career because he’s not developing. He’s mainly only doing good when he faces weak opposition that his adviser Al Haymon sets him up with after each time he gets beaten. It would be far better for Broner to have a new trainer like Roach so that he can improve enough to beat guys like Marcos Maidana and Porter without suffering defeats to those guys.

There’s a lot of fans who feel that Broner is badly in need of a new trainer at this point in his career after watching his poor performances against Marcos Maidana, Shawn Porter, Carlos Molina, Paulie Malignaggi and Emmanuel Taylor. Those bad efforts from Broner account for 5 out of his last 7 fights. The only fights that Broner has looked good in during the last two year were his mismatches against John Molina and Khabib Allakhverdiev. Broner didn’t need a good game plan or technique to beat Molina and Allakhverdiev. Those were guys that even the likes of Humberto Soto and Jesse Vargas could beat. Broner stopped Allakhverdiev in the 12th round earlier this month on October 3rd in Cincinnati, Ohio.

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If Broner is going to become the PPV start that he wants to be, he’s going to need to get a lot better than he’s shown recently. Since there’s no improvement in his game with Stafford as his trainer, it means that Broner is going to need to get a new trainer like Roach in order to take him to the next level.

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