By William Mackay: British junior middleweight contender Ryan Rhodes (45-4, 31 KO’s) is looking forward to his bout next Saturday night against WBC junior middleweight champion Saul Alvarez (36-0-1, 26 KO’s) at the Arena VFG, Tlajomulco de Zúñiga, in Jalisco, Mexico.
There are expected to be 15,000 Mexican fans in the Arena on that night and Rhodes, 34, sees himself scoring a knockout over Alvarez.
“It’s going to be amazing – I just hope there’s a tunnel for us to get out of there safely,” Rhodes said to the guardian.co.uk. “Walking into 15,000 screaming Mexicans booing will excite me. I think I’ll knock him out. I really do. I don’t want it to go the distance and leave it in the judges’ hands.”
Rhodes isn’t a puncher on the same level as Alvarez and it’s unclear how precisely Rhodes intends on getting a knockout over Alvarez when he’s not going to be the hardest puncher in the ring on June 18th.
Besides that, Rhodes is going from European level opposition to a world class fighter and doing it rather late in his career in a hostile environment. That’s not the best of conditions for an aging fighter to be taking on a young phenom like Alvarez.
To be sure, Rhodes is one of the best domestic/European fighters around. However, Alvarez is world class and a cut or two above the kinds of guys that Rhodes has been more or less feasting on the past 16 years of his pro career.
Rhodes will be going from the likes of Luca Messi and Rocky Junior into a fight against the powerful Alvarez. I don’t see that as good preparation for the kind of hell that Rhodes will be going through next Saturday night. Rhodes doesn’t have any real gimmick to fall back other than his movement, and even that has slowed in recent years as he’s aged.
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