(Photo credit: Esther Lin/Showtime) By Chris Williams: Last May, Marcos Maidana (35-4, 31 KOs) seemed to surprise Floyd Mayweather Jr (46-0, 26 KOs) with his ferocious attacking style of fighting. Maidana fought well enough in the early part of the fight to lose by a 12 round majority decision.
Mayweather showed his skills and eventually adapted to Maidana’s aggressive style and was able to win a conclusive 12 round decision. This Saturday, Mayweather and Maidana will be fighting again, and Maidana believes the rematch is going to help him more than Mayweather because he now has a working knowledge of Mayweather’s style of fighting.
The kind of things Maidana is talking about in correcting what he the last time he fought Mayweather had to do with spacing and distance. Maidana feels that if he gets far enough away from Mayweather, he’ll be able to get more power on his shots instead of him standing too close and smothering his own power.
The drawback to Maidana standing farther away from Mayweather is that it’s going to enable Mayweather to move backwards to avoid Maidana’s shots, and he’ll be able to get away from him much easier. I’m not sure that Maidana and his trainer Robert Garcia have thought this new spacing strategy out.
“It might be a little bit of an advantage for him, but I think it benefits me more having a rematch with him,” Maidana said via the .losangelesregister.com. “I’m able to correct the mistakes I made in the first fight and take advantage of his mistakes. Even though he makes very few mistakes I already know what they are, and I think I can exploit that and take advantage of them.”
Robert Garcia also wants Maidana to throw fewer punches in the rematch so that he won’t gas out like he did last May. Garcia initially talked about wanting Maidana to throw 100 punches per round in the rematch, but he now seems to have changed his mind about that, perhaps due to the way Maidana has looked in training camp during the sparring sessions.
Garcia has to have discovered by now that Maidana fades in the second half of his fights if he throws over 90 punches per round. That’s probably why he’s talking about having Maidans throw fewer shots in the rematch in order to keep him from fading so badly.
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