(Photo credit: Esther Lin/Showtime) By Dan Ambrose: WBA welterweight champion Marcos Maidana (35-3, 31 KO’s) expects to have a ton of support for his fight this Saturday night against WBC champion Floyd Mayweather Jr. (45-0, 26 KO’s). Maidana is a huge underdog in this fight by the odds-makers, who see him as being too slow and too much of a slugger to defeat a ring technician like Mayweather. However, Maidana feels that he’s going to have the support of his Latino fans, and that’ll give him the energy to give Mayweather his first defeat of his career.
“I have the support of the Latino people and I’m coming to win. To see these people here supporting me is amazing. I know people think I’m going to lose, but I come to win and I’m not afraid of anybody or anything.”
Maidana needs a good game plan to beat Mayweather, and he’ll need to stick with that game plan because he’s probably not going to be able to do anything that Mayweather hasn’t seen before if he decides to make some adjustments. Maidana needs to put a lot of pressure on Mayweather, and to force him into the ropes like he did with Adrien Broner. Mayweather wants to impress the fans in this fight, and that seems to be an overriding concern that he has this time out more so than in his last two fights against Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and Robert Guerrero.
It could be that Mayweather feels so confident that he’s going to win that he feels he can fight Maidana’s fight. Maidana will do better if he can get Mayweather against the ropes where he can’t move around as much. Maidana will then be able to land body shots at least, and possibly he might be able to wear Mayweather down in that manner.
This is Maidana’s big chance at the big time, and he’s going to need to fight much better than Canelo did last September. Canelo didn’t fight like he wanted to win, and Maidana can definitely do a better job than Canelo. The bar is really low for Maidana to do a better job than that.
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