By Dan Ambrose: A lot of boxing fans have forgotten about the beatings that Miguel Cotto took in fights against Antonio Margarito, Shane Mosley, Joshua Clottey and Manny Pacquiao. That’s partly because Cotto’s promoter Bob Arum has kept Cotto protected as of late, putting him Miguel with the weak punching Yuri Foreman so that Cotto could win the WBA junior middleweight paper title and then putting him in with 38-year-old past his prime Ricardo Mayorga.

Arum is continuing with that trend, more or less, with his matching of Cotto against a recently injured and badly beaten Margarito on December 3rd. But however shot that Margarito may now be, he’s still got a big size and work rate advantage over the smaller Cotto. And Margarito has a much better chin than the Puerto Rican. With his ability to take punishment, it means that Margarito is going to be in Cotto’s face all night long drilling him with big shots.

That’s bad news for Cotto, because he wears down quickly and starts to bleed when he gets hit with regularity. Cotto can take a decent shot but not over time. He starts bleeding and runs out of gas quickly. Margarito already knows how to beat Cotto from having stopped him with a hail of shots in an 11th round TKO win in 2008.

It’s going to be that much easier for Margarito to repeat that effort in their rematch on December, because he’s already solved Cotto. He knows Cotto is a sucker for an uppercut, and can’t take it when he starts getting hit in return. Cotto can dish out the punishment but when he’s asked to take a small amount of punishment, he fades and gets stopped.

Cotto will do in the first four or five rounds, but when the fight gets to the second half, Cotto will run out of gas and take a beating.