By Dan Ambrose: WBA welterweight champion Marcos Maidana (35-3, 31 KO’s) is already leaking part of his plan in how he intends on beating Floyd Mayweather Jr. (45-0, 26 KO’s) in their fight on May 3rd. Maidana says he’s going to fight Mayweather dirty to a certain extent to try and nullify his skills. Using power, pressure and fighting dirty as his tools, Maidana could make for an interesting fight on May 3rd when he gets in the ring with Mayweather at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Mayweather was with a decent puncher in his last fight against former WBA/WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez last September, but Canelo fought like a bigger version of Adrien Broner in that fight. He was flat-footed, and wasted the entire fight by trying to mimic Mayweather’s shoulder roll defense and doing a poor job of it. Maidana isn’t as stupid as that to try and use Mayweather’s fighting style in order to beat him. That would be really dumb, but Canelo sure showed his age against Mayweather.
“I have to fight Mayweather with all my tools, just like the way he fights, a little bit dirty, but very intelligently,” Maidana said to RingTV. “He has fought many great fighters I don’t know how hard they punched him, but on May 3rd, I am going to check him…He hardly makes any mistakes at all. He’s too good, but we’ll see.”
The only dirty tactics I’ve seen Maidana use in the past was hitting low, using his head, hitting on the break, and throwing punches to the back of his opponent’s heads. Maidana doesn’t tend to throw punches after the rounds have ended, so that’s one less thing that Mayweather has to worry about. But Maidana does throw a lot of looping shots that wind up hitting his opponents on the back of their heads, and there’s no defense for that for Mayweather. About the only thing he can do to avoid getting hit with a punch behind the head is to lean backwards and stay as far away from Maidana as possible. That’s not going to work very well though because Maidana will catch up to Mayweather sooner or later and tag him with a big looping shot that catches him behind the head.
Maidana better be prepared for Mayweather to fight dirty as well if he decides to fight that type of fight. We saw what happened to Victory Ortiz when he decided to bend the rules by head-butting Mayweather back in 2011 when they fought.
Comments are closed.