By Sean McDaniel: If you were to weigh the chances of 34-year-old Ryan Rhodes (45-4, 31 KO’s) against WBC junior middleweight champion Saul Alvarez (36-0-1, 26 KO’s) for this Saturday night you’d have to say that they’re not good. Even Rhodes may be the better fighter in terms of skills and experience, the fact remains that he’s fighting younger guy, a stronger guy and will be fighting him in his home country on Saturday night a the Arena VFG, Tlajomulco de Zúñiga, Jalisco, Mexico.
And if that weren’t problems enough for Rhodes, the fight will be held at altitude, making it hard for Rhodes to breath.
Rhodes will have to get to Alvarez before he starts tiring and well before Alvarez’s punches start adding up. We saw in Alvarez’s fight against Jose Miguel Cotto last year that he can be hurt if you come after him hard with a big assault in the early rounds. Rhodes is a bigger puncher than Cotto, but he’ll need to load up with everything he throws if he wants to get the best of Alvarez. Rhodes can’t afford to take Alvarez’s huge shots for 12 rounds and count on being able to win a decision.
And he might not want to trust that his chin will be able to take the monstrous punches from Alvarez the same way that Matthew Hatton was able to in his lopsided 12 round decision loss in March. Matthew took some enormous shots and really there’s an argument that can be made that the fight should have been stopped by the midway point of the fight when it was already quite obvious that Hatton had no real chance of winning and was just getting bludgeoned.
Comments are closed.