(Photo credit: Hogan Photos) By Scott Gilfoid: #1 IBF Kell Brook (32-0, 22 KOs) says his foremost plan for Saturday night is to try and box IBF welterweight champion Shawn Porter (24-0-1, 15 KOs) in an effort to take his title by that method.
If that fails to work, then Brooks says he’s going to get in the trenches and slug it out with him to see if he can beat him at his own game at the StubHub Center in Carson, California.
“I’m more of a boxer, and that’s how I want it to say,” Brook said via Skysports.com. “But I’m not afraid to make it a dogfight.”
Hearing Brook say that he could be lured into a war with Porter tells me that Brook isn’t going to stay committee to his trainer Dominic Ingle’s likely plan-A by focusing on his strength – boxing. If Brooks is going to be so easily thrown off his game on Saturday night by Porter, then I really give Brook any chance of winning this fight.
Brook frankly doesn’t have the skills to beat Porter in trench warfare and if he tries it, we could see Brook take a battering even worse than Paulie Malignaggi did last April in getting stopped in the 4th.
Malignaggi made a mistake of trying to mix it up with Porter, and by the time he realized he’d made a huge mistake, he was beyond the point of no return. Malignaggi’s face was cut, and he looked like he was punch drunk and unable to extricate himself from the mess that he’d gotten himself into.
Brook really needs to stay on plan-A no matter how bad things go, because if he shifts into plan-B and tries to slug it out with Porter in a kind of Custer’s last stand type scenario, it’s going to be over quickly. Porter will route Brook within a couple of rounds and have him on the run trying to survive.
It’ll be too late though for Brook at that point, because Porter will have already inflicted the damage and he’ll easily finish Brook off within a round or two. That’s why it’s so much better for Brook to stick with the only thing that will give him a chance of surviving the full 12 rounds and that’s by boxing, moving and keeping his guard up.
Brook can’t fight with his hands down by his waist like he sometimes does when he’s teeing off on some hapless 2nd tier opponent thrown in the ring with him, because he’ll get pummeled by Porter.
Comments are closed.