By Dan Ambrose: Former WBA/WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez’s trainer Jose “Chepo” Reynosa wants the 23-year-old Canelo to punish WBA 154l-pound champion Erislandy Lara (19-1-2, 12 KO’s) in their fight on July 12th at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. He wants Canelo to give the Cuban Lara a prolonged beating in this fight for some reason.
The only thing that Lara did was badger the red-haired Canelo to try and get him to fight him, because he’d seen Canelo fighting guys that are arguably below his own talent in Matthew Hatton, Alfredo Angulo, Shane Mosley, Alfonso Gomez, Austin Trout, Josesito Lopez, Kermit Cintron and Ryan Rhodes. Lara basically just called Canelo out on him facing a lot of weak guys instead of stepping it up to fight him. The one good opponent Canelo has fought during his career, Floyd Mayweather Jr, soundly beat him last year.
“We’re working so hard so that we can punish Erislandy Lara,” Reynosa said to RingTV. “We’re working on trying to punish Lara. We want to really punish Erislandy Lara. He was talking too much and those comments were not welcome. It was blah, blah, blah and ‘Canelo’ took it very personal.”
I wonder why Canelo took it personal that Lara was telling him what he thought of his fight resume and his talent level. Instead of getting upset about it, Canelo should have taken it as a situation where Lara was trying to be helpful by pointing out his weaknesses. How can you expect Canelo to improve if everyone is smothering him with compliments after he beats up on someone like Angulo or Matthew Hatton?
This whole thing about Canelo trying to punish Lara could very well backfire on Canelo with him getting schooled by the Cuban fighter, because this guy is the closest thing you can get to Mayweather in the junior middleweight division. As we saw in the Canelo-Mayweather fight, Canelo is light years away from the talent level that Mayweather has. The way that Canelo looked in the Mayweather fight, there’s no way he’s going to be to improve in less than a year to punish a Mayweather clone like Lara. In fact, I think if there’s anyone that’s going to be punished in this fight, it’ going to be Canelo.
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