By Jason Kim: Golden Boy Promotions has picked out the perfect opponent for their young star in the making WBC junior middleweight champion Saul Alvarez (40-0-1, 29 KO’s) to beat up on Showtime this Saturday at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Alvarez, 22, will be facing a welterweight slugger in Josesito Lopez (30-4, 18 KO’s) and this fight reeks of the same kind of mismatch as when Golden Boy matched Alvarez against another welterweight in Matthew Hatton last year.
Lopez isn’t a bad fighter, but he’s not a legit welterweight, and he has no business fighting at 154, other than collecting a paycheck by Golden Boy to face their up and coming star in Alvarez.
There were five or six actual junior middleweight contenders that Golden Boy could have matched against Alvarez instead of dipping into the junior welterweight pool to grab Lopez. But it looks like Golden Boy liked the idea of Alvarez facing a fighter that has spent almost his entire career, apart one fight, at light welterweight.
Lopez has a brawler and he’s got the wrong style beat Alvarez. He’s not a big puncher, and his lack of power will be even more a problem for him against Alvarez, who can punch. Lopez only knows how to fight one way and that’s by standing in front of his opponents trying to slug it out. He’ll try that with Alvarez this Saturday, and it’s going to go badly for him.
Lopez earned the fight with Alvarez by moving to welterweight last June and winning by as 9th round stoppage in a grueling fight. It’s shocking that Lopez will be back in the ring only three months later after that fight because he took a lot of punishment from Ortiz and with that kind of fight he should have taken at least five to six months off.
The punishment that Lopez took against Ortiz will be nothing compared to how much he’ll take against Alvarez. Lopez is going to really get pounded in this fight if he doesn’t get knocked out early. I see this as a fight that Lopez can’t win.
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