Roach predicts Canelo KO loss on Saturday

By Boxing News - 11/16/2015 - Comments

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By Dan Ambrose: WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto’s trainer Freddie Roach is predicting a knockout win for his fighter this Saturday night against Oscar De La Hoya’s No.1 gravy train money fighter Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (45-1-1, 32 KOs) on HBO PPV. Roach thinks that Cotto will hand De La Hoya’s red rooster his first knockout loss of his 10-year pro career and Roach is betting on it taking place.

Canelo, 25, has shown to have a pretty decent chin thus far in his career, but it’s difficult to really know how good it is because Canelo has faced only two good – but not great – punchers over the years in James Kirkland and Alfredo Angulo.

Those guys aren’t huge punchers, and both of them had very slow hand speed and were coming off of long layoffs at the time they fought Canelo. In addition to their long layoffs, both Kirkland and Angulo had to take off a lot of weight to get ready for their fights against Canelo. You can chalk it up to De La Hoya for picking out two inactive fighters for Canelo to face when giving him his hardest punchers of his decade long career.

“We are looking for a knockout in this fight, and we will be the first person to knock out Alvarez, and I can’t wait to get this one on its way,” Roach said. “I think [Miguel] is the best fighter he’s ever fought, and I think he’s handpicked opponents.”

I don’t think that Cotto is the best fighter that Canelo has ever fought, but he’s definitely the second best fighter behind Floyd Mayweather Jr. I think Cotto is definitely the hardest puncher that Canelo has ever faced before. Hands down, Cotto is the hardest puncher that Canelo will have faced, and it’s going to be interesting to see how well Canelo handles those hard shots.

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Erislandy Lara was a decent puncher, but he was moving too much and not sitting down on his shots against Canelo. But I still think Lara did enough to deserve the decision against Canelo, but he just wasn’t lucky in the scoring of that fight. One of the judges had Lara winning, but the other two saw Canelo winning.

“Mayweather was a tough fighter but not a big puncher, and this is the first heavy puncher he’s going against,” Roach said.

The way to beat Canelo, besides boxing and moving, is to unload on him with combinations. However, I don’t think Cotto will be trying to do that. He’ll likely be looking for one big shot at a time, and if he can stun Canelo, then he’ll look to finish him off with a flurry of punches to get him out of there. It would be like how Cotto broke Sergio Martinez down. He did it with single shots. Once he Martinez hurt in the later rounds, he started throwing more combinations.

“His [Cotto] punching power is improving,” Roach said. “And he’s using every bit of his body weight to do that. It’s something we have been working on and he’s punching very well.”

Cotto isn’t a bigger puncher than he was before. Roach is going overboard a little here. Cotto is 35, and he’s not getting stronger than he was in his 20s. The one thing he is doing is throwing more left hooks, which was his signature punch earlier in his career before he was trained by Emanuel Steward and others.

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Cotto has been helped mostly in that he’s moved up in weight from the welterweight and junior middleweight divisions. At middleweight, Cotto has more power because he does not have to cut weight as much. If he moved up to the full weight for the middleweight division at 160, he would have even more punching power.

I think Cotto is looking too much to gain perceived advantages by using catch-weight handicaps in his fights instead of him realizing that he’s stronger the heavier he is. Cotto doesn’t need the 155lb catch-weight he’s using for his fight this Saturday night against Canelo. It’s a waste of time for Cotto to be bothering with the catch-weight, and it just makes him look bad for having it for this fight.

“I feel that this guy [Canelo] gets hit too much, and I think Miguel will knock him out somewhere along the way,” Roach said.

Canelo does get hit a lot, especially to the head. As long as Cotto doesn’t sit down and make it easy for Canelo, he should be able to pick him apart with single power shots all night long to soften him up for a later knockout. That’s the best way to beat Canelo.



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