Santa Cruz vs. Frampton = Fireworks on Saturday

By Boxing News - 07/27/2016 - Comments

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(Photo credit: Amanda Westcott/SHOWTIME) By Scott Gilfoid: Carl Frampton (22-0, 14 KOs) expects his fight against WBA Super World featherweight champion Leo Santa Cruz (32-0-1, 18 KOs) to be a really tough one on Saturday nighton July 30 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.

Frampton, 29, has his game plan down for the match and ready to spring it on Santa Cruz, but he realizes too that the fight could ultimately come down to the two of them brawling in center ring. In other words, tactics might fail and Frampton could be stuck having to prove that he can beat Gonzalez the old fashioned way by slugging it out.

Frampton is moving up in weight for this fight; although he could wind up back down at super bantamweight if he fails to beat Santa Cruz. I mean, it’s hard to imagine Frampton being able to beat any of the other featherweight champions. Gary Russell Jr. is probably too fast, Lee Selby too tall and rangy, Jesus Cuellar too powerful, and Oscar Valdez too dangerous.

Santa Cruz is probably the most vulnerable of the five featherweight champions at the moment. Yeah, it’s so, so sad that the featherweight division has five champions instead of one. Besides it being utterly confusing to the boxing fans, it just seems wrong. It’s like having five football teams with the same name. How on earth do you expect the casual fans to be able to tell what’s what when there are so many champions in each division. It’s too bad there isn’t a boxing commission that could unify all the sanctioning bodies into one sanctioning body for each division so that it’s easier for the fans to know who the top dog is in each weight class.

“It may be brutal but I’ll be ready for what comes my way,” said Frampton to fightnews.com. “There are different tactics I can use against Santa Cruz, but it will come down to how hard I hit him. He likes to come forward, but I don’t think he’s ever faced someone who hits as hard as I do. He’ll have to take risks.”

I can just imagine what Frampton’s tactics will be for the Santa Cruz fight. If you look at some of Frampton’s past fights against hard sluggers, he likes to use a lot of movement to keep from getting hit. I think straight out of the gate on Saturday, Frampton’s Plan-A will be him looking to box rather than slug. I can’t see him wanting to stand and punch with Santa Cruz at all, period.

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Frampton doesn’t have the ability to throw a lot of punches the way that Santa Cruz typically does. In Santa Cruz’s fight against Abner Mares last year in August 2015, Santa Cruz threw 1,057 punches in pounding out a 12 round decision. I don’t think for a second that Frampton is going to want to stand in front of Santa Cruz and be on the receiving end of over a 1000 punches, because he’s never shown himself cap[able of throwing that many punches in the past. Besides that, I don’t think Frampton has the chin to hold up under that kind of withering fire. Frampton was knocked down twice in round one last year by 22-year-old Alejandro Gonzalez Jr. in July 2015 in El Paso, Texas.

In Frampton’s last fight against Scott Quigg, he was hurt in the 2nd half of the fight by one of Quigg’s big shots. Frampton was fading badly in the last six rounds of that fight and unable to just stand and fight the way he needed to for him to shut Quigg down. I think if Frampton had decided to make a last stand, he would have been knocked out.

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Quigg definitely had his number in the second half of the fight, mainly because he was pushing the fight and forcing Frampton to fight harder than he was capable of doing. Santa Cruz is capable of fighting hard for 12 rounds, not just six like we saw from Quigg. This means that for Frampton to beat Santa Cruz on Saturday night, he’s going to need to be able to fight him and prove that he can beat him in the pocket in a one-on-one manner.

Frampton has his tactics for this fight, but I think his tactics are going to implode quickly on the night, and he’ll be forced to fight in a way that will be his last option. The other plans used by Frampton will very likely involve moving, holding, staying on the outside, and possibly even attempts and roughing Santa Cruz up. If they all fail miserably, as I expect them to, we’ll see Frampton be stuck having to slug with Santa Cruz in the center of the ring.

Frampton has not looked at all good in his last two fights against Scott Quigg and Alejandro Gonzalez Jr. While Frampton looked decent during stretches in both fights, he had a lot of bad moments in those fights. He’s just plain lucky to have gotten out of the Quigg fight with a win, because if Quigg had fought hard for 12 rounds, he would have won that fight. The last time that Frampton looked really good was in his fight against Chris Avalos last year in February in winning by a 5th round stoppage. Frampton had an easy mark in that fight, which is why he was able to look so sensational. Avalos has lost two out of his last three fights since his loss to Frampton, including his last two in KO defeats to Mark Magsayo and Oscar Valdez. I’m not sure what the deal is with Frampton. It could be that age is starting to catch up to him at age 29, or it might be that the ring wear is suddenly starting to show it’s ill affects. It might also just be that Frampton was never that good to begin with, and he’s now being exposed with him fighting better opposition all of a sudden. Before his fights against Quigg and Gonzalez Jr., Frampton’s toughest opponent of his career was Kiko Martinez.