By Dan Ambrose: I’m going to go out on the limb and make a prediction that WBA junior middleweight champion Miguel Cotto will lose and lose badly to 37-year-old Ricardo Mayorga next month if Cotto gets cut at any point in the fight. It doesn’t matter how the cut occurs. Cotto will lose just the same, as long as the cut occurs above one of Cotto’s eyes. The reason I say this is because Cotto, unlike some fighters, tends to fall apart when he starts bleeding from cuts over his eyes.

He seems to stress out, lose his composure and fall apart mentally. Mayorga needs to take a good look at Cotto’s fights against Antonio Margarito, Zab Judah, Joshua Clottey and Manny Pacquiao. If you look at each of these fights in great detail you’ll notice that Pacquiao looked good until the blood was flowing. Once he was cut, he reacted in a variety of ways, sometimes throwing low blows, and other times running.

And in some cases, taking knees. Mayorga has got to take advantage of Cotto’s tender skin around his eyes by looking to aim his shots at these areas and hope that he can get the blood flowing once he hits him enough. It won’t take a lot of punches, because Mayorga punches better than Margarito and Clottey, and those guys had Cotto bleeding quite nicely. Mayorga just needs to stay busy and aim his shots, and the rest will fall in place once Cotto has blood dripping into his eyes making it hard for him to see where the punches are coming from.