(Photo credit: Esther Lin/Showtime) By Dan Ambrose: WBA junior middleweight champion Erislandy Lara (19-1-2, 12 KO’s) feels that Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (43-1-1, 31 KOs) has a big ego and far too much for his limited talent. Lara says he wants to knock Canelo down a peg to make him more humble when they face each other this Saturday night at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Lara normally doesn’t study his opponents, but he took a look at the 23-year-old Canelo’s last two fights against Alfredo Angulo and Floyd Mayweather Jr, and he saw plenty of holes in Canelo’s game that he can take advantage of.
Lara wouldn’t say what those flaws were, but it seems pretty obvious that Canelo’s flat-footing fighting style, his poor stamina, his lack of explosive power, and his inability to shift out of 2nd gear to put his opponents away are all things that Lara likely saw that he feels he can exploit in this fight on Showtime pay-per-view.
“Alvarez is arrogant and high on his horse. I want to knock him off that horse,” Lara said. As a person, no, because I don’t know him. But yes, there’s bad blood because he looked down on me and made me look like a nobody. I want to not only put a beating on him, but embarrass him and take him to school while showing him what boxing is all about.”
That sounds like Lara wants to clown Canelo on Saturday the same way that Mayweather Jr did to him last September in putting on a boxing clinic. What Mayweather exposed in that fight was not only Canelo’s flat-footed stance and his ability to shift from 2nd gear to the higher gears in his game, but he also exposed problems with Canelo’s trainer due to him failing to have Canelo adapt to what Mayweather was doing in the fight.
It was like Canelo and his team came into the fight with a plan-A, and when that didn’t work, they were stuck without the ability to come up with anything else. Canelo will need to have multiple plans against Lara on Saturday night because plain old pressuring him probably will backfire on Canelo. And trying to box Lara is also a plan that is doomed for failure.
We saw Canelo trying to box Mayweather, and it was just a disastrous plan that had Canelo’s fingerprints written all over it. It’s hard to imagine his trainer Chepo Reynoso coming up with that brilliant strategy, because it so bone-headed.
Canelo used the same plan against Austin Trout last year, and the two of them fought to basically what looked to be a draw. Canelo was given a wide decision though by the three judges working the fight, but the fight was essentially a draw. I had Trout winning, but many other boxing fans saw the fight as a draw, but what was important about that fight was how Canelo boxed Trout instead of trying to take the fight to him to stop him.
Canelo gave up all the advantages that he had over Trout in that fight by electing to box him instead of using his power to chop him down. It didn’t make sense at all, and it just looked like Canelo came up with that idea himself to fight that way, and he ended up making the fight a lot closer than it should have been.
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