By Eric Thomas: In boxing speed often is the key ingredient for fighter A to beat fighter B. If your shots can land before your slower opponent then more often than not, you win. Tonight one of the faster fighters Floyd Mayweather Jr. will be facing a slower guy in WBA junior middleweight champion Miguel Cotto, and we’ll get a good chance to see how Mayweather’s superior speed leads him to victory.
Mayweather said this about his speed to RingTV “If he [Cotto] turn it into a dog fight, he can’t get to the target before I get to the target. So, even though he can punch, you’ve got to realize this. He’s hit the canvas before, and not just by [Manny] Pacquiao and Antonio Margarito.”
Cotto has problems even against slower guys, as we saw in his loss to Margarito, who is one of the slower fighters that you’ll see in the top 15 rankings.
Mayweather is correct about his hand speed allowing his shots to get to the target first. The question is what will Cotto do to handle that? If Cotto can take Mayweather’s punches and fire back immediately with his own, he might do all right. However, Cotto will have to find a way to get a stoppage against Mayweather because he can’t get into a back and forth fight with Mayweather and hope to win.
Cotto’s skin is too fragile, and he’ll likely end up cut to ribbons if he fights Mayweather in that kind of fight. Cotto does well when he can get a stoppage before his skin starts breaking down or when he’s able to box on the outside against more limited fighters like Margarito in their rematch or against 38-year-old past his best Ricardo Mayorga. That’s the ideal situation for Cotto, but it might not play out like that tonight against Mayweather. As such, Cotto needs to go all out and try to get a stoppage win anyway he can before he runs into problems with his skin tearing or getting hit with a shot he doesn’t see coming.
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