By Dan Ambrose: WBA welterweight champion Paulie Malignaggi gives Robert “The Ghost Guerrero a decent chance of beating Floyd Mayweather Jr. tomorrow night at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Malignaggi likes the way that Guerrero doesn’t get flustered when his opponents make an adjustment on him and get the upper hand for a moment.
Malignaggi feels that Guerrero will be able keep mentally strong tomorrow night if things start to go badly for him at some point in the fight.
Malignaggi said to the star-telegram.com “Guerrero has the mental capacity maintain his composure to get it back his way if things go wrong. A lot of what Floyd does is psychological and you lose control. If the fight starts to slip away, Robert can regain some sort of advantage.”
That sounds logical what Malignaggi is saying, but what if Guerrero never has any advantage even from the start. If he’s fighting an uphill battle from round one, it’s going to be tough for him to regain anything if he can’t even get his footing under him from the start. This isn’t Michael Katsidis or Andre Berto Guerrero is fighting tomorrow night.
Those guys fought really bad fights against Guerrero, and made it easy for him to win. Mayweather has a higher ring IQ and he’s not going to just stay on the ropes trying to figure how to use the shoulder roll like Berto did, and he’s not just a slow plodder like Katsidis.
If Guerrero can’t even get in the fight then it doesn’t matter if he keeps his composure because he’ll be getting schooled the entire time. It’s nice when a fighter stays calm they’re getting clowned, but it doesn’t change the fact that they’re getting embarrassed in front of a lot of people.
In looking at Guerrero’s recent fights against Selcuk Aydin and Berto, I don’t see anything in Guerrero’s game where he has the skills to gain any advantage like Malignaggi is talking about.
Guerrero looked crude in both fights, and if you take away the fouling he did in the Berto fight, then that would have been a close fight. The Guerrero that beat Berto would get totally out-boxed by Mayweather. So, if there’s any kind of adjustments that Guerrero is going to make on Saturday to gain an advantage over Mayweather, I haven’t seen it yet.
Guerrero looks pretty much the same each time he fights, and there’s nothing I see in his game that will cause Mayweather any problems, aside from the fouling. Guerrero can gain a definite advantage if the referee looks the other way while Guerrero throws rabbit punches to the back of Mayweather’s head of holds and hits him like he did against Berto, but I don’t think this referee that’s been assigned to the fight will put up with too much of Guerrero’s fouling before he starts taking away points.
He’ll start with a warning then move onto taking points. I just hope Guerrero follows his instructions because it would be bad if he ended up getting disqualified because he couldn’t make adjustments to control his fouling.
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