Cotto-Mayorga: Miguel to try and box Ricardo on 3/12

By Boxing News - 02/22/2011 - Comments

Image: Cotto-Mayorga: Miguel to try and box Ricardo on 3/12By Dan Ambrose: Photo credit Chris Farina/Top Rank – WBA junior middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (35-2, 28 KO’s) plans on trying to box 37-year-old challenger Ricardo Mayorga (29-7-1, 23 KO’s) on March 12th instead of going to war with him and risking suffering a cut or potentially a knockout loss when they go at it at the MGM Grand, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Cotto, 30, is trying to get back to his old boxing style of fighting and slugging less. He’s going to need to do this because if he goes to war with the sturdy, powerful and unorthodox Mayorga, Cotto is going to be at a great risk to getting knocked out again. Cotto just doesn’t seem to have the beard to be able to stand and trade with big punchers like he used to.

It could be that he never really had the size or the chin to take a lot of punishment, but whatever the case, Cotto has been badly beaten up when he has tried to trade in the past three years in defeats to Antonio Margarito and Manny Pacquiao, as well as the terrible punishment Cotto took in his close win over Joshua Clottey.

Cotto’s trainer Emanuel Steward says “Miguel was always a beautiful boxer and I am trying to get him back to doing that more. Mayorga is wild and throws punches from everywhere and that’s the biggest challenger for Miguel in this fight.”

I don’t think Cotto is capable of following a set pattern of boxing Mayorga. Cotto is too set his ways and while he may start off boxing Mayorga at the start of the fight, Cotto will do what Cotto always does and that’s slug. When that happens, I see Mayorga doing really well with his head shots. It won’t take long before Cotto’s face is swollen to the point where he’s going to look like he was stung by an angry horde of bees. His lips will be swollen, nose bleeding and both eyes cut. These are almost a given for Cotto in his fights nowadays. If you put hands on Cotto and he responds by swelling and bleeding. The thing is Mayorga hits hard enough to really hurt Cotto if he’s able to land shots for more than three or four rounds. It won’t take long for Mayorga to have Cotto looking terrible.



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