(Photo credit: WBC Alma Montiel) By William Mackay: WBC junior middleweight champion Saul Alvarez (39-0-1, 29 KO’s) will be looking to net one of the biggest names in boxing to his resume on May 5th against former three division world champion “Sugar” Shane Mosley (46-7-1, 39 KO’s) in their HBO televised pay-per-view bout on the undercard of the Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Miguel Cotto bout front and center at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Mosley, 40, says he’s taking this fight because he believes he can win it. A lot of boxing fans it as a case of Mosley looking to feather his retirement nest by getting another nice little payday against the 21-year-old Alvarez. By now, Mosley must have an idea of what he’s up against in this fight, because he’s facing a younger fighter with heavy hands and good boxing skills in Alvarez.
This isn’t just an average run of the mill 21-year-old fighter that Mosley is facing on May 5th. Alvarez has got it all – power, work rate, boxing ability and youth in abundance. He lacks experience and hand speed, but those other factors are very important for him and will give him a tremendous advantage against the 40-year-old Mosley. This is a really bad point in Mosley’s career right now, as he hasn’t won a fight in ever three years.
That’s kind of mind-boggling when you think about it, because he was so good in his last win against Antonio Margarito in January 2009. However, what may have hurt Mosley was that he stopped fighting after picking up that win along with the WBA World welterweight title and sat in active for 16 months until facing Floyd Mayweather Jr. in May 2010. Mosley made a major mistake by not fighting for a year, because when a fighter gets in his late 30s like Mosley, they need to stay active in order not to lose something that they may or may not ever recapture. In Mosley’s situation, he appears to have lost some of his reflexes with that time off, and he’s not pulling the trigger on his shots like he once did earlier in his career. That’s bad because he’s facing a guy that will be firing on him all night long with hard power shots without let up. Mosley will look really old if he can’t keep up with Alvarez, and even if he could, I don’t know that he has the size to compete.
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