By Dan Ambrose: WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (41-0-1, 30 KO’s) has spent the past month sparring with southpaws with the same size and fighting style of his opponent for this Saturday night WBA junior middleweight champion Austin Trout (26-0, 14 KO’s) and the 22-year-old Canelo sees himself as being 100% ready for this fight.
Canelo said to centraldeportiva.com “During the preparation had good sparring with the style and characteristics of Trout and we are ready. Trout is a southpaw and that makes it tough fights. He also has very good defense, and is fast, large, has many qualities. However, for that I trained with sparring appropriate to the level of my opponent.”
As good as whoever Golden Boy Promotions came up with to work as Canelo’s sparring partners to get him ready for this fight, there’s no way that they could have found anyone that is even close to being as skilled as slick as Trout because if they could find such a person, he’d be a champion instead of just a sparring partner.
Canelo won’t be ready for the kind of game that Trout will be bringing on Saturday night because there is no one that Golden Boy could have hired with the ability to mimic what Trout can do unless they were to hire Floyd Mayweather Jr. to help Canelo and that obviously would never happen.
This fight comes down to a match-up between a slick southpaw with Mayweather-esque skills in Trout fighting a flat-footed younger fighter with a Mexican fighting style and an inability to fight on the move or at a fast pace. Canelo needs to be able to walk around the ring and set his feet against a stationary target for him to throw with power.
Canelo needs someone like a Josesito Lopez that will stand with his back against the ropes so that Canelo can plant his feet and tee off on him with everything he’s got. He can’t fight on the move and we saw that in his fight against 40-year-old Shane Mosley recently when Mosley used a little bit of movement and Canelo looked angry and frustrated.
Canelo had a look on his face like ‘Will you stop moving so that I can punch you like I do my other opponents that just stand there like punching bags.’ Mosley failed to move enough and was too courageous for his own good and plus he was too old to win. Trout won’t fall into that trap. He’ll keep moving the entire fight and end up making Canelo look really bad.
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