(Photo Credit: Stephanie Trapp / SHOWTIME) By Dan Ambrose: Jose “Chepo” Reynoso, the trainer for WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (41-0-1, 30 KO’s) is predicting a knockout win for his fighter tonight at the Alamodome in San Antonio, Texas in his fight with WBA junior middleweight champion Austin Trout (26-0, 14 KO’s).
Reynoso told ESPN “We’re going to win by knockout. We’re very confident.”
Having seen how slow Canelo’s fighting style is in his past fights, it’s hard to imagine him stepping it up in a high enough gear to get a stoppage win over an actual junior middleweight like Trout.
Canelo couldn’t knock Shane Mosley, Matthew Hatton and Lovemore Ndou, and he barely stopped Ryan Rhodes in the 12th round. Canelo was struggling against Alfonso Gomez and seemed stuck in first gear. Canelo doesn’t see capable of putting out a lot energy needed to score a stoppage because he’s too busy conserving energy for some reason.
I can understand why he fights at a slow pace because just looking at how heavily he breaths in between rounds and how red his face gets when he exerts himself, it seems pretty obvious that he doesn’t possess the cardiovascular system to go all out round after round to score a stoppage over a fighter like Trout.
Believe me, if there’s going to be a knockout recorded in this fight it’s going to be from Trout, not Canelo. He has the better stamina and he can fight hard for 12 rounds without tiring. He doesn’t gas out after fighting at full speed for three minutes and he doesn’t need to pace himself.
Trout could end up beating Canelo tonight simply by turning up the gas full blast and leaving it there for five or six rounds until the 22-year-old Mexican wears out and is too physically exhausted to defend himself from Trout’s incoming fire.
I see Canelo as one of those guys that needs to fight at a slow pace because if you push him out of his comfort zone, he’s going to wear down on you. I’m sure his trainer Chepo would like for Canelo to get a stoppage tonight because that would certainly make things much easier for his fighter, but he’s not facing a light welterweight tonight like in his last fight when he beat up the smaller Josesito Lopez.
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