By Rob Blakeman: It has always been my understanding that in boxing, to take a Champions crown you must do so decisively. There must be no question, no doubt, a true beating by the better man must be witnessed and acknowledged if not quite by all then by the vast majority.
Otherwise the Champion should keep the title he usually worked and battled so hard to win. The scorecards for Miguel Cotto against Saul “Canelo” Alvarez did appear to attest to such a drubbing, reading as follows: 119-109, 118-110 and 117-111.
These are scorecards that hardly reflect a close fight-but we all know that’s not what we saw. An 11-1 score in favor of Canelo (46-1-1, 32 KOs) is downright absurd. But we don’t want noises of a rematch which would be roused by a close decision and so a hatchet job on Cotto’s performance is convenient and the ‘right’ choice as far as business is concerned is the path of least resistance.
So as the dust settles I feel like so many of you do, like a victim in what I now call “The Emperor’s New Clothes “syndrome. Whereby we are all duped by some kind of amnesiac osmosis into believing what we witnessed in fact wasn’t! We were all in error apparently when we called the fight extremely close as thousands of you did in live tweets and similar.
I personally thought a draw was certain, as no man had been dominant-certainly not enough was done by Alvarez to remove a Champion’s World title and heritage, a terrible thing to be done to such a great sportsman like Cotto. He once again reached into the flames to face a younger, stronger opponent and at times gave him a boxing lesson.
Don’t get me wrong, Alvarez certainly had his moments but failed to follow them up, his mouth gaping open at times as he struggled with the pace that Cotto had him working at. So unfortunately another great fight is overshadowed again by a dubious result. The decision stands and so even more members of the public become cynical about the true place in sport for World Championship boxing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXsrtg1BVE8
The fact is, as I train up and coming fighters I always let them know outright that if you stick around long enough at boxing you will win some fights that you probably should have lost and you will certainly lose some that you definitely won! This is certainly true in local amateur boxing anywhere in the World but also in regional and of course Professional International fights.
One positive thing to come to from this debacle for me anyway was a greater emphasis with a Mr Amir Khan, okay, he just chases the big paydays and never wants to address rematches with his conquerors but maybe he’s got just the perfect attitude required in this industry of vampires and skull-duggers.
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