By William Mackay: If WBA light welterweight champion Marcos Maidana (30-2, 27 KO’s) focuses his attack upstairs against Robert Guerrero (29-1-1, 18 KO’s) he will probably lose by a lopsided 12 round decision in their fight on August 27th at the HP Pavilion in San Jose, California. If you study Guerrero’s fights in which he problems in that past in fights against Michael Katsidis, Orlando Salido, Malcom Klassen and Gamaliel Diaz, Guerrero never showed any weakness when taking head shots.

For some reason, Guerrero seems to be immune to getting hurt when tagged hard to the head. His problems occur when you attack his body the way that Salido, Katisdis and particularly Diaz did. Guerrero doesn’t do a very good job of hiding the fact that the body punching affects him. He clearly doesn’t like to get hit hard to the body and tries to sway away from the shots when he’s repeatedly tagged there.

This is obviously where Maidana needs to put all of his focus. The problem that Maidana has is that he’s been a head hunter his entire career and often forgets completely about throwing to the body. When he does remember to go to the body, he’s proven to be a devastating body puncher as we saw in him taking out Victor Cayo with a nice right to the body in March 2010. Maidana really loads up on his body shots and seems to be able to get a lot more leverage in those punches than he does when he goes to the head.

However, Maidana forgets completely about throwing body shots for extended amounts of time in his fights and that really hurts his game. Look at his fight against Amir Khan for example. Maidana head hunted the entire fight, and only when he had no other option but to throw to the body in the 10th round when Khan was holding onto him did Maidana start going back to the body. Maidana has got to focus on throwing to Guerrero’s body early and make that the plan of attack, because hitting Guerrero in the head is a waste of time. He’ll either just take the shot or make Maidana miss by moving.