(Photo credit: Naoki Fakuda) By Dan Ambrose: Dan Rafael of ESPN is yet another writer picking Floyd Mayweather Jr. to school WBA junior middleweight champion Miguel Cotto and KO him on Saturday night on HBO pay-per-view.
The deck is heavily stacked against Cotto in this fight, because he doesn’t have the skills needed for him to win unfortunately.
Rafael said this at ESPN: “As much as I’ve been a fan of Miguel Cotto throughout the years, it’s very difficult to see where he has any advantages in this fight. He’s not a better defensive fighter than Mayweather. He’s probably one of the best defensive fighters of this era, maybe or definitely one of the best defensive fighters of all time…He’s [Cotto] going to have to find that big punch to land. I have a hard time trying to find a way for Miguel to win this fight…I think we’re going to see a spectacular Mayweather performance. I think we’re going to see a stoppage late in this fight.”
There it is. Rafael is picking Mayweather by stoppage. It looks like Cotto’s goose is royally cooked for this fight. I hope he and his new trainer Pedro Diaz can come up with some kind of game plan to negate all of Mayweather’s obvious advantages in this fight, because if not, we’re going to see Cotto get humiliated along the same lines as Victor Ortiz was last September.
Cotto supposedly has his confidence restored after three straight easy fights. Rafael wasn’t impressed with Cotto’s recent win over Antonio Margarito, pointing out that Margarito was basically a slow and shot fighter by that point in his career. But Cotto still has gotten a lot of confidence from that win, and doesn’t seem to be listening to what boxing fans have been saying about how badly depleted Margarito was by the time Cotto finally got around to fighting him again.
Cotto’s trainer Pedro Diaz is going to have to come up with the perfect plan for Cotto beat Mayweather on Saturday, and I don’t think there’s a plan that Diaz can come up with that Mayweather can’t adapt to and negate.
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