By William Mackay: WBA light welterweight interim champion Marcos Maidana (29-2, 27 KO’s) will be trained by famous trainer Nacho Beristain for Maidana’s next fight against Erik Morales (51-6, 35 KO’s) on April 9th at the MGM Grand, in Las Vegas, Nevada. Maidana, 27, and the 34-year-old Morales will be fighting for Amir Khan’s WBA light welterweight title, which is now vacant after the WBA promoted Khan to the WBA Super World light welterweight champion position to make available his WBA strap for Morales-Maidana.
Beristain also trains WBA/WBO lightweight champion Juan Manuel Marquez. However, it hardly matters who Maidana is trained by for this fight. He’s going to be all over the weaker, skinnier Morales and is going to give him a lot of trouble. Maidana can be out-boxed, as we saw in Maidana’s losses to Khan and Andriy Kotelnik, but whoever faces him gets battered regardless. Maidana lost the fight against Kotelnik by a very questionable 12 round decision in a fight that took place in Germany. Few people who saw the fight felt that Kotelnik deserved the decision.
As it was, Kotelnik took a real beating in the fight. Khan also took a huge pounding from Maidana, and is incredibly lucky that the fight wasn’t stopped in the 10th when Khan was basically taking one-sided punishment for an entire round after being staggered.
Morales doesn’t move as well as Khan and doesn’t jab the way that Kotelnik does. As such, I see Morales being there for Maidana to trade with and I can see this going badly for Morales.
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