By Jason Kim: Last Saturday night, Miguel Cotto (35-2, 28 KO’s) resurrected his floundering career with a 9th round stoppage win over WBA junior middleweight champion Yuri Foreman at Yankee Stadium. Cotto showed much better defensive skills, movement and the use of his jab than he had in any one fight in his nine-year pro career. Cotto, 29, will now be looking at what direction he should go in for his next fight.

Cotto’s promoter, Bob Arum of Top Rank, would likely to use Cotto as a possible back-up plan to be matched against Manny Pacquiao if Arum isn’t able to set up a fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr. in November. A rematch with Antonio Margarito is also a possibility for Cotto. Margarito took a lot of punishment in his fight against Cotto in 2008.

However, Margarito waited until Cotto was fatigued in the 10th, and hurt him with a big uppercut and took him out in the 11th. Despite what a lot of people say about that fight, Cotto really didn’t take a lot of punishment. He was rarely hit until the end of the 10th, when he got hammered by some solid shots. But the punches that Cotto did get hit with, however, created big cuts above both eyes and broke his nose.

A rematch between Cotto and Margarito remains an appealing option for fans, Margarito and possibly Cotto if he wants to risk getting beaten up again. However, I’d also like to see how Cotto would do against the other junior middleweight champions in the division. The current junior middleweight champions are Sergio Martinez, Cory Spinks and Sergeii Dzinziruk. Those are all good fighters but ones that Cotto is capable of beating if he fights the way he did against Foreman.

The key is that Cotto has got to use his jab the way he did in the Foreman bout. The jab is the key and Cotto’s new trainer Emanuel Steward was right to have Cotto throwing more jabs. Cotto has one of the best jabs in the welterweight and junior middleweight divisions. It’s incredible that Cotto wasn’t using his jab more in his fights in the past two years.

If you look at Cotto’s fights against Margarito, Joshua Clottey and Manny Pacquiao you can see that Cotto would use his jab very seldom and instead was constantly looking to get inside and throwing power shots to the head and to a lesser extent to the body. Cotto used to be a great body puncher, but he seems to have gotten away from that in the past couple of years as he’s become more of a head hunter.

If Cotto had used his jab more and mixed in more body punching, I think he would have done a lot better against Margarito, Clottey and Pacquiao. Steward needs to teach Cotto how to clinch more because I didn’t see any clinching from Cotto in the Foreman fight. Cotto is going to need to be able to clinch his opponents to shut down their offense because he’s got to have another way of slowing down his opponents other than moving or throwing a lot of punches back at them.

In dealing with Martinez and Dzinziruk, Cotto will have to box more and use movement because he isn’t going to be able to beat these guys by going straight at them and trying to overpower them with shots. Those guys jab too well and have excellent movement as well. They’re clearly both a step up from Yuri Foreman and Cotto wouldn’t be able to count on an injury occurring that would get him through the fight. These guys would stay upright and be jabbing Cotto constantly. Cotto would have to use every trick in Steward’s book to beat these two fighters. I think it’s possible but it would be really tough for Cotto.