By Dan Ambrose: The late great trainer Emanuel Steward saw flaws in Saul “Canelo” Alvarez’s game in watching his fight against Shane Mosley last year in May while Steward was working with HBO. Steward felt that Canelo didn’t fight for the full three minutes of every round and saw him taking way too many rest breaks and letting his opponents land shots.
Steward said this about Canelo: “His biggest weaknesses are he fights in spurts. There’s not much consistency in the way he fights…he doesn’t box a lot.”
Not much has changed in Canelo’s game since his win over Mosley. He still fights in spurts and he still isn’t consistent enough. He was able to blow out light welterweight [140 pounder] Josesito Lopez last September in four rounds, but this is someone that Golden Boy Promotions found at light welterweight for Canelo, and he never stood a chance Canelo had huge weight and strength advantage and beat him on size alone.
In Canelo’s last fight against Austin Trout, Canelo still fought in spurts for the entire fight and acted like he was tired in the second half. The open scoring gave Canelo a huge break in that fight because the judges scores were lopsided in his favor after the fourth and eighth rounds, allowing Canelo to fight with lots of rest breaks.
Honestly, there’s not much you can do with a fighter like Canelo because he simply doesn’t have the stamina to fight hard for a full three minutes, so you can’t expect him to put out maximum effort. That’s why he’s always going to be in danger of losing to better conditioned fighters than him.
At 22, this is probably as good as it gets for Canelo in terms of his stamina. He’s not getting better in that department as he ages because it’s usually the reverse with fighters getting more tired as they get older.
If Canelo fights with the open scoring by the World Boxing Council, that could help him because if he gets judging giving him lopsided scores, he can take rest breaks and ease off and conserve his limited energy.
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