Alvarez faces his best opponent of his career on Saturday night against Cintron

By Allen Fox: WBC junior middleweight champion Saul Alvarez (38-0-1, 28 KO’s) has largely been coddled by his Golden Boy promoters his entire six year pro career, matched against guys that he could blow away, a lot of small and older fighters. He’s faced old warriors like Lovemore N’dou, 40, Carlos Baldomir, 40, and a bunch of small guys like Jose Miguel Cotto, Alfoso Gomez and Matthew Hatton.

Alvarez won the WBC title against a non-junior middleweight in Hatton, and then defended it twice against two less than stellar fighters in Ryan Rhodes and Gomez. Alvarez has really flourished with the match-making done for him by Golden Boy. And now on Saturday night, he’s going to be facing a guy that at one time was a pretty good fighter in Kermit Cintron (33-4-1, 28 Ko’s), but is now clearly showing signs of wear and tear. Cintron won his last fight against Antwone Smith, but was defeated in his last two fights before that against Carlos Molina and Paul Williams. Alvarez is fighting Cintron at the exact right time to get an easy scalp with a big name assigned to it.

People years from now won’t consider that Cintron was on the downside of his career when Alvarez beat him. Instead they’ll just be impressed with Alvarez was able to knock a guy like Cintron off. However, Alvarez has got to look good in doing so and not getting dropped or trapped in a life and death fight. Thus far, he’s looked great in beating the limited opposition that’s been fed to him, but Alvarez has showed a casualness to his game that he needs to change. He lacks a sense of urgency that he’s going to need to beat the better fighters. Alvarez can’t fight at half speed with no emotion and think he’s going to beat the quality fighters. That’s not going to happen.

Alvarez fought like he was taking a stroll through the park in his last fight against Gomez. He gave away a lot of rounds in that fight and should have dominated the smaller, weaker Alvarez. Fortunately, Alvarez was able to wobble and take Gomez out in the 6h round when he finally got serious but it wasn’t an impressive performance from Alvarez by any means.