Roach wants Cotto-Canelo rematch

By Boxing News - 12/14/2015 - Comments

roach4By Dan Ambrose: Freddie Roach, the trainer for Miguel Cotto (40-5, 33 KOs), still cannot let go of the fact that his fighter was beaten last month by Mexican star Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (46-1-1, 32 KOs) in losing his WBC middleweight champion in their fight in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Roach says he wants a rematch for Cotto, because he thinks the scoring was very unfair. The boxing public as a whole did not have a problem with Canelo winning the fight, as they saw it as a clear cut win for him.

Where they did have, a problem was with the oddball scoring by the three judges who worked the fight.

The judges gave Canelo a 12 round unanimous decision by the scores of 118-110, 119-109, and 117-111.

“I still think he [Cotto] won the fight,” Roach said to Fighthype. “I thought the numbers [of punches] we landed were much higher. I definitely think we won. I told him [Cotto] I would love to get a rematch, but he just smiled at me and said ‘We’ll see what happens.’ We both thought we won the fight. I don’t know if I’ve seen a worse decision in my life. 11 rounds to 1, there’s just no way. We came up with a great game plan to out-box him, and I think we did,” Roach said.

Cotto will probably get his rematch with Canelo in 2017 if he is willing to wait. I do not think it is going to happen in 2016, because Canelo’s promoter Oscar De La Hoya is talking about wanting to match him against some welterweights, and then possibly Gennady “GGG” Golovkin.

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If Canelo faces Golovkin, then he will be back in 2016, likely licking his wounds from that fight and needing a comeback fight opponent to rebound from a knockout loss. Cotto might be what the doctor has ordered to get Canelo back on the winning track again.

Where Cotto went wrong in the Canelo fight was not agreeing to a rehydration limit for the fight. I think if two fighters were only 10 pounds apart in weight when they set foot in the ring on that night, Cotto would have easily won. But Canelo looked like a small cruiserweight during the fight, and there was no way that the tiny 160lb Cotto was going to be able to beat Canelo looking as big as he was.

HBO did not have a weight for Canelo on the night of the fight, but I thought he looked heavier than his previous high of 175lbs for one of his fights. I thought he looked at least 180lbs, which would mean Canelo rehydrated 25 pounds after weighing in at 155lbs for their catch-weight title fight.

If Cotto could have added a rehydration clause to his contract with Canelo, I think that would have been the most important way for him to win the fight. Roach had the right idea by having Cotto box Canelo, because he did well when he was boxing him. However, with Canelo so much heavier than Cotto, he needed the fight to take place on an even playing field by having the two fighters weighing at least somewhat close to each other.

If this was a heavyweight contest, it wouldn’t have mattered if Canelo came into the fight with a 15 to 20 pound weight advantage, because heavyweights have so much size anyway that it doesn’t matter too much when one fighter has that kind of weight advantage.

Nevertheless, for a middleweight contest, it is just too much of an advantage when one fighter has a huge size advantage over another. I know Daniel Geale had a big weight advantage over Cotto in their fight earlier this year, but Geale does not have much punching power, so it did not matter that he outweighed Cotto by a huge margin. He did not have the power to take advantage of his superior weight.

Canelo’s promoter Oscar De La Hoya has already expressed interest in putting Canelo back in with Cotto, but he obviously is not going to do it right away because there are other fights that he is interested in like Canelo vs. Amir Khan, Tim Bradley or Gennady Golovkin. Once the smoke clears from those fights, I see De La Hoya putting Canelo back in with Cotto for another pay per view fight on HBO. There’s too much money still on the table for De La Hoya not to make another Canelo-Cotto fight or two.



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