By Allan Fox: Erislandy Lara (19-2-2, 12 KO’s) isn’t playing nice by keeping silent about his 12 round split decision loss to Golden Boy Promotions’ No.1 fighter Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (44-1-1, 31 KOs) last Saturday night on Showtime pay-per-view. Lara feels that Canelo was given a gift decision by two of the judges that gave him the win.
Lara says that he landed more shots than Canelo did in the fight, and that the majority of the best punches that Canelo did land were in the 7th round after Lara suffered a cut. Canelo poured it on in that one rare in throwing a huge amount of shots while Lara had blood leaking from his cut into his left eye.
“Oscar De La Hoya said that I have to wait in line to fight Alvarez again because there are 10 others ahead of me. That speaks volumes because he knows Canelo got a gift.” Lara said. “Who are these 10 guys he’s talking about? I want to know. I won this fight and a rematch needs to happen right away.”
It’s not likely that there is more than 3-4 guys that De La Hoya can match against Canelo if they’re looking for opposition that will interest boxing fans. De La Hoya already said that he’s interested in matching Canelo against the following fighters: James Kirkland, Miguel Cotto, Floyd Mayweather Jr and Gennady Golovkin. De La Hoya can extend that list in the future by including the likes of Manny Pacquiao, Dementrius Andrade, Sergio Martinez, Peter Quillin, Jermell Charlo, Marcos Maidana, Keith Thurman, Shawn Porter, Devon Alexander, Lucas Matthysse, Robert “The Ghost” Guerrero, Amir Khan, and Lamont Peterson.
For many of those fighters, they would have to be willing to move up in weight to fight Canelo at either junior middleweight or middleweight for the fights to happen. But De La Hoya does have the option to expend Canelo’s potential opponents in the future if he can work out deals with adviser Al Haymon and Top promoter Bob Arum.
“Before the decision was announced, I felt 100% confident I won the fight,” said Lara. “The facts don’t lie, I landed more total punches. Looking at it from the punch stats, you’re supposed score based on clean and effective blows landed. Most of the shots that Canelo landed were body blows that didn’t even land cleanly, and most of them came in the round where I got cut. All my punches were clean shots. I out jabbed him and boxed his ears off. The punch stats don’t lie…there is no way I lost to Canelo.”
The reality is that Lara did lose, at least with the two judges that gave Canelo his win. He won by a 2 votes to 1 decision, and that’s enough for De La Hoya to want to move on and not give Lara a second chance at beating his money fighter. Lara needs to see things from De La Hoya and Golden Boy’s viewpoint. They absolutely need Canelo to win and keep winning in order to keep the company doing well. They’re not going to let a dangerous fighter like Lara get a second chance at fighting Canelo given how close the fight was last Saturday.
The number one objective for De La Hoya and Golden Boy is to keep Canelo winning, and they would be taking a risky gamble by letting Lara fight him again. Canelo already showed that he didn’t know how to deal with Lara’s speed and mobility. Canelo was fortunate that Lara undermined his own cause by not being a little bit busier, because had he throw more punches, he probably would have won the fight.
Canelo was wide open for everything that Lara threw in the fight, and it was a mistake on Lara’s part by not taking full advantage of that by throwing 50-80 punches per round in order to dominate Canelo fully the way he was clearly capable of doing.
“I’m very disappointed in Judge Levi Martinez for his horrendous score. How in the world did he score it 117-111? Before the decision was announced, I stood across the ring and saw Team Canelo and their body language said it all. You could see the depression in their eyes. Everyone on their whole team had a look of despair because they were defeated. When the final score was read, their look went from despair to relief. They knew they lost the fight, period.”
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