Mayweather thinks Roach didn’t give right advice to Cotto

By Boxing News - 11/23/2015 - Comments

roach991By Chris Williams: Floyd Mayweather Jr. wasn’t impressed with Miguel Cotto’s trainer Freddie Roach last Saturday night with the way he worked Cotto’s corner in his 12 round decision loss to Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (46-1-1, 32 KOs) in their fight in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Mayweather was particularly disappointed with the way that Roach failed to put some heat under Cotto in the last half of the fight to tell him that he was trailing and needed to pick up the pace if he wanted to win.

Roach acted as if things were going swell for Cotto in the last half of the fight despite the fact that it was clear that Canelo was taking control of the fight and cruising to a decision.

Roach later said that he thought that Cotto had won the fight with Canelo, which would explain why he wasn’t pushing him to pick up the pace to take the fight to Canelo. As experienced as Roach is as a trainer, it’s hard to believe that he wouldn’t have the awareness to know when one of his fighters is trailing in the fight, or when a particular fight is close, as this one appeared to be.

Little did anyone know, the three judges that worked the fight had Canelo up by a huge margin all throughout the fight? The judges scored the fight 118-110, 119-109, and 117-111. Roach should have known from watching Canelo’s past fights that the judges tend to give him wide scores in close fights where he’s either losing or the fight is close. We saw that in Canelo being given a draw by one of the judges in his loss to Mayweather, and we saw how the judges gave Canelo a wide score win over Austin Trout in a fight that appeared to be very, very close.

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“Cotto didn’t have the right trainer. He wasn’t giving him the right advice,” Mayweather said to Fighthype.com about Roach. “You know what? This coach done a [expletive] up job. If you’re losing, your coach don’t need to wait for you to get to the 10th round to tell you that you losing. If your coach knows you’re losing in the 4th round, if that was the case, that’s when a trainer needs to step up and say, ‘You know what? Pick up the [expletive] pace. You losing. The fight is extremely close.’”

Maybe Roach didn’t want to climb all over Cotto for fear of upsetting him with the truth by telling him that things were starting to look bleak for him in the last six rounds of the fight. That’s about the only thing you can say for Roach to try and understand why he wasn’t acting with a little more urgency in the corner. Roach wasn’t letting Cotto know in strong terms that things were looking really bad for him in the last four rounds when he was starting to take punishment and lose rounds.

Cotto feels that Roach is a great trainer, so it’s hard to imagine he’ll dump him after this loss. If Cotto is going to keep him, then he needs sit down and have a long talk with him about why he wasn’t letting him know that he needed to pick up the pace in the Canelo fight.

If Roach was truly unaware that Cotto was losing the fight, then that tells me that Cotto needs to dump Roach and find a trainer that can tell when his fighter is losing or not. If Roach failed to tell Cotto that he was losing the fight due to him not wanting to upset him, then he needs to realize that he’s not being paid to keep the truth from Cotto. He’s being paid to tell him the straight truth about his skills and about how things are going in his fights.

If it was me, I would have been lashing Cotto verbally from the 3rd round, telling him he’s getting worked over by the bigger Canelo. I’d have had him throwing a lot more punches and using his left hook in the fight instead of wasting time just throwing jabs and right hands, which had no effect in stopping the much heavier looking Canelo.

Roach should have seen that Cotto’s jabs and right hands weren’t powerful enough to do anything with Canelo due to his weight advantage. When you have a fighter as big as Canelo was last Saturday, you’ve got to hit him hard with your best punch if you want to slow him up. Roach didn’t tell Cotto to use his left hook and that’s pretty sad.



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