By Manuel Perez: WBA welterweight champion Miguel Cotto (32-0, 26 KOs) easily faces the toughest fight of his seven year professional boxing career on July 26th against tough Mexican Antonio Margarito (36-5, 26 KOs) at the MGM Grand, in Las Vegas, Nevada. However, as much success as Cotto has found in boxing career in which he’s beaten fighters like Shane Mosley (albeit by a controversial 12-round decision), Alfonso Gomez, Paulie Malignaggi, Zab Judah, Ricardo Torres, and Carlos Quintana, none of those fighters are in the same class as Margarito. This is the problem for Cotto, who is shorter by four inches than the 5’11” Margarito, and is also giving up six inches in reach to the Mexican.

This means that Cotto will be forced to try and make it an inside fight if he has any hope of winning the fight, and even under those circumstances, Cotto will have to pray that he can somehow hurt Margarito and take him out. Margarito is far too busy for Cotto to beat him by a 12-round decision unless he’s able to knock him down two or three times in the process. One knockdown likely won’t be enough to beat Margarito, because he’ll be unloading on Cotto with many more punches per round and will likely have a huge advantage in overall punches landed in every round of the fight.

On the outside, Cotto doesn’t stand a chance even with his new jab that he’s recently learned how to throw. The jab has been effective against shorter fighters like Mosley, Gomez and Judah, but against a fighter with more range and longer arms like Margarito, Cotto will find himself coming up short and getting hit without being able to land his own shots.

This will force Cotto to come inside and fight that way he often does, trying to out-gun his opponents on the inside and take them out with hooks to the head and midsection. The problem here is that Margarito has an uppercut that he likes to use against short fighters like Cotto, and will likely catch him with it again and again as Cotto bends forward trying to land his big shots.

That’s a going to be a problem for Cotto, because he’s going to need to stay in close if he has any chance of winning against the taller, longer-armed Margarito. On the inside, Cotto usually is the one in command, beating his opponents with huge shots to the midsection and head and taking most of them out after a number of rounds. However, he’s never faced an opponent with a chin as good as Margarito, nor the work rate or an inside game as formidable as Margarito. As things go, Cotto is going to be catching pure fire when he tries to stand in close, getting hit with non-stop hooks from the side and uppercuts from below.

He’s not had to face a fighter that doesn’t stop punching like Margarito, which has given Cotto time to get in his own shots and not focus as much on trying to protect his fragile chin. In this case, Cotto will have to cover up and protect himself much more often because he doesn’t have a beard tough enough to take the kinds of shots that are raining down on him like the ones he’ll be receiving from Margarito all night long.

The only real chance for Cotto is too try and stay on the outside, move around the ring and pick his spots to selectively trade shots with the busier Margarito. Cotto is simply too small to stand and trade with Margarito for full rounds. Say what you want about Cotto, he’s really a small welterweight, who has been able to beat other smaller welterweights with less than impressive chins. Carlos Quintana was the exception as far as size goes, but in his case, his chin was as weak as Judah and the rest of the weaker-chinned welterweights that Cotto has beaten since moving up from the light welterweight division.

Against Margarito, however, Cotto will be exposed as being too small to deal with the fire power and size of Margarito. It will be like matching big George Foreman against the smaller, cruiserweight like Joe Frazier, with a huge mismatch resulting. Anyway you want to look at this fight, Cotto is just too small to beat a big fighter like Margarito. For that matter, I see Cotto having just as many problems against the tall lanky Paul Williams, who would also likely box Cotto’s ears off in a one-sided mismatch.