By Dan Ambrose: #1 WBO Mikey Garcia (30-0, 26 KO’s) will take his unbeaten record into his fight this month against WBO featherweight champion Orlando Salido (39-11-2, 27 KO’s) on January 19th at Madison Square Garden in New York.
For Garcia’s sake you’ve got to hope that his trainer Robert Garcia has taught him some defense, and has him throwing combinations because he’s not going to get the job done against a fighter like Salido with his single shot type offense.
Garcia has been matched so incredibly softly. The easy match-making has led to Garcia picking up the bad habit of admiring his work each time he throws a single punch. It’s like he expects his opponent to fall over, and I can understand that because when you’re facing weak opponents like the ones that Mikey Garcia has been facing for the past six years, they often do collapse when they get hit.
However, that’s not going to be the case on January 19th against Salido. He’s going to take Garcia’s shots and he’s going to return fire with nonstop punches, and it’s going to put Garcia into a situation where he’ll have to stop fighting like a tin man and start fighting like a world class fighter by throwing with speed and combinations if he wants to win.
Believe me, if Garcia stops to admire his work against Salido he’ll be sorry he did it because he’ll tagged in the head and look worse than he did in his last fight against Jonathan Victor Barros.
Garcia defeated Barros by an 8th round knockout in his last fight in November, and while Garcia did win the fight, he got hit an awful lot from Barros. It wasn’t pretty to watch because of how disappointing Garcia was.
Salido has beaten Juan Manuel Lopez twice in the past year along with Weng Haya and Moises Gutierrez.
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