By Allan Fox: In 19 years as a professional fighter, 40-year-old Shane Mosley (46-7-1, 39 KO’s) has never been knocked out before during his career. But he’s looking more and more shot with each fight and his excuses for his below average performances just don’t fly anymore.
Mosley was easily beaten in his last fight against Manny Pacquiao last May by a 12 round decision. Mosley has had a lot of time to sit and reflect on that loss and will return to the ring on May 5th against 21-year-old WBC junior middleweight champion Saul Alvarez (39-0-1, 29 KO’s) on the undercard of the Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Miguel Cotto bout at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.
In his last three fights, Mosley has suffered a lot of punishment in fights against Floyd Mayweather Jr., Sergio Mora and Manny Pacquiao. He lost two of the three fights and probably should have lost them all. He’s getting hit a lot and was forced to run in the Mayweather and Pacquiao fights to save himself from absorbing punishment. Running may not work against Alvarez, however, because he’s so good at cutting off the ring and forcing his opposition to fight. Alvarez has chopped down his last three opponents Ryan Rhodes, Alfonso Gomez and Kermit Cintron. He’s getting more of a killer instinct to finish off his opponents instead of letting them hang around like he was doing previously. That was one of the main knocks on Alvarez was that he had a bad habit of keeping his offense in 1st gear and fighting without passion. In his last fight against Cintron, Alvarez really went after him and wore down until the fight was finally halted in the 5th round.
Mosley will likely try and punch with Alvarez in the first couple of rounds, but I see him quickly going into the survival mode when he realizes that he doesn’t have the strength or the youth to stand up to Alvarez. But I still think Alvarez will take the fight to the aging Mosley and end up flattening him. Mosley may have been one of the best fighters in boxing in the 90s and the early 2000s, but he’s an old toothless lion now and Alvarez is too young and too strong for him. I see this ending badly for Mosley.
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