By Dave Lahr: With only one day remaining until their World Boxing Organization title bout at New York’s Madison Square Garden, title holder Miguel Cotto (33-1, 27 KO’s) weighed in at one pound under the welterweight limit at 146, while his 32-year-old challenger Joshua Clottey (35-2, 20 KO’s) came in right at the limit at 147. Clottey is hoping to try and rip the WBO title from Cotto’s possession and has picked a perfect time to fight Cotto, who was defeated by Antonio Margarito 11 months ago in a fight that could potentially have lasting effects.
Offensively, Clottey is more than a match for Cotto, with better hand speed and almost equal power. Where Clottey doesn’t measure up is in stamina and the ability to move around the ring like Cotto. However, Cotto showed that his ability to move around the ring has it’s limits, as he ran out of gas after running from Margarito for nine rounds and was hurt at the end of the 10th. In the next round, a tired out Cotto was stopped by Margarito.
In most of Cotto’s fights, he’s taken pride in going right after his opponents and taking them out with big power shots. However, he won’t be able to do that against Clottey without risking getting hit with something big.
I do expect that Cotto will probably try to knock him out early anyway, because that seems to be Cotto’s main goal in his fights. I do think that Cotto will try to use some in and out movement in the early rounds so that he can avoid going toe to toe with Clottey when he’s at his best. The longer the fight goes, the better it is for Cotto.
Clottey, however, intends to take a page out of Margarito’s playbook and go right after Cotto if he decides to run from him. It may take a big effort to catch Cotto, because he did a lot of movement in his fight with Margarito and showed an excellent ability to stop on a dime and fire off hard shots.
Strangely enough, Cotto was able to throw with big power even while fighting on the back foot. However, as Margarito showed, it doesn’t take a lot of shots to get Cotto in trouble. Indeed, Margarito hardly laid a glove on Cotto until the end of the 10th when he caught Miguel with some hard uppercuts.
At that point, Cotto was exhausted and had little left. The smart thing for Cotto to have done would have been for him to clinch his way to victory in the last couple of rounds. Cotto, though, would have none of the clinching business and tried to fight it out with Margarito in the 11th.
As such, once Cotto was forced to stand his ground and fight it out with Margarito, Miguel was no match for the Mexican and was quickly taken out with big shots. Clottey doesn’t have the same kind of stamina that Margarito does, but then again he’s much faster than him and might be able to mimic the damage that Margarito did in the fight in six or seven rounds, and take Cotto out. Clottey is essentially a six or seven round fighter, because after that he fades dramatically.
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