By William Mackay: On March 5th, EBU welterweight champion Matthew Hatton (41-4-2, 16 KO’s) will likely suffer a brutal beating against WBC Silver light middleweight champion Saul Alvarez (35-0-1, 26 KO’s) in their fight at the Honda Center, in Anaheim, California. Hatton, 29, could have opted to take a much easier fight for the World Boxing Association welterweight paper champion Vyasheslav Senchenko, but instead opted to take the more dangerous fight with the much bigger payoff against the much respected but inexperienced Alvarez.
Hatton may have chosen the fight for another reason as well, as it’s a fight that will get a lot of pubicity because it will be shown on HBO on 3/5. If Hatton had decided to take little known Senchenko, Hatton would have had to be satisfied with just the local coverage in the UK instead of having the fight shown in both America and the UK. Also, by Hatton facing Alvarez, Hatton won’t look nearly as bad if he loses, because few people are giving Hatton much of any chance to beat Alvarez.
That means that Hatton won’t look nearly so bad if he gets destroyed or if he fights hard enough to lose by narrow margin. It’s much worse for Hatton if he takes on a soft target like Senchenko, because if Hatton gets wiped out or dominated by Senchenko, he’ll never live it down and will keep hearing about it forever.
Hatton doesn’t really have the power needed to fight Alvarez in a one-on-one manner. As such, Hatton is going to have to use a lot of movement to keep from getting nailed by Alvarez. Given that Hatton is a lot older than the 20-year-old Alvarez, it’s going to probably be Hatton that wears out long before the 20-year-old Alvarez.
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