Garcia-Lopez: Last chance for Juanma?

By Boxing News - 06/13/2013 - Comments

lopez56By Eric Thomas: This Saturday night Juan Manuel Lopez (33-2, 30 KO’s) will be stepping inside the ring with WBO featherweight champion Mikey Garcia (31-0, 26 KO’s) at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, Texas.

This is probably the biggest fight that the 29-yer-old Juanma could get right now, but it’s also one of the most dangerous ones for him because he’s lost two out of his last five fights and he looks like a shell of his former self.

Mikey Garcia is a dangerous puncher and an excellent counter puncher. He’s a nightmare fighter for someone like Lopez, who was beaten twice by Mikey victim Orlando Salido. Lopez took beatings both times in those fights and looked pretty well beaten both times.

Now, Lopez is fighting an arguably more dangerous fighter in Mikey Garcia and it doesn’t look good for Lopez.

I’m sure Lopez’s promoter Bob Arum can still do something with him if he loses this fight badly to Mikey on Saturday night, but it’s going to take some really skillful match-making on Arum’s part to find a champion vulnerable enough to where Lopez can beat them.

For Juanma to beat Mikey on Saturday night, he’s going to have to avoid mixing it up with him too much in the first six rounds. Mikey is mostly dangerous in the first half of his fights and he then tends to fade as the fight progresses in the second half.

We saw Orlando Salido starting to get to a tired Mikey in the 7th and 8th rounds in their recent fight and he showed pretty clearly that Mikey has stamina issues that can be exploited in the second half of his fights.

Salido also showed that Mikey has problems with taking pain, as we saw Mikey pretty much quit after getting his nose broken. If Lopez can drag Mikey to the deep waters and hurt him with power shots, we could see Mikey reverting to form and calling it quits when he can’t handle the pain.



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