By Dan Ambrose: Former world title challenger Gabriel Rosado isn’t giving the soon to be 31-year-old James Kirkland (31-1, 28 KOs) much of a shot to beat former WBA/WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (44-1-1, 31 KOs) in their fight on May 2nd at the Alamodome in San Antonio, Texas.
Rosado sees it as a fight that Canelo’s promoters at Golden Boy is trying to hype up as a competitive match-up due to Kirkland having a name, but he doesn’t see it as a bout where Kirkland has much of a chance of winning it due to the extensive ring rust he has.
Kirkland hasn’t fought since 2013 when he beat Top Rank fighter Glen Tapia by a 6th round stoppage. That was 15 months ago, and by the time Kirkland enters the ring to face the 24-year-old Canelo next May, Kirkland will have been out of the ring for 18 months. That’s a year and a half.
You don’t like to see fighters sitting outside of the ring for that long of a spell, especially when they’re going to be coming back without a tune-up fight. Kirkland obviously could have taken a couple of tune-up bouts to sharpen up, but if he did that then he probably wouldn’t have gotten the Canelo fight.
It was a situation where Kirkland pretty much had to take the fight now while it was offered to him, because it might not have been there if he’d waited to lose some weight and get a couple of tune-up bouts out of the way first.
“Kirkland’s been out for so long. Kirkland’s not active so how can he beat Canelo right now?” said Rosado via esnewsreporting.com. “It’s a fight they’re promoting it and trying to hype it up because Kirkland’s a name, but let’s be real; the boy hasn’t fought since Glen Tapia. That’s a long time, and he ain’t young. Kirkland isn’t young. Kirkland is 30, right? Kirkland goes up to 200 pounds. I think Canelo is a good fighter, but he fights in spurts. That’s his downfall. He’s not busy enough,” Rosado said.
Kirkland has reportedly ballooned up to 200 pounds while sitting out of action all these months, and it’s going to take him a lot of time to take that kind of weight off. Can Kirkland take the weight off in time for the fight? Probably, but he’s not going to be stronger for having taken the weight off because when you lose 45 to 50 pounds, you want to take it off slowly and not within a two month period like Kirkland is going to have to do in order to get ready for the fight.
Kirkland is further not going to be helped in that he won’t be trained by his long-time trainer Ann Wolfe. For some reason, Kirkland decided to go in another direction for this fight against Canelo, and that obviously isn’t a good thing right now. For a fight as big as this against Caenlo, Kirkland shouldn’t be making big changes to his training team.
De La Hoya and Golden Boy have done a good job of selecting an out of shape and rusty fighter in Kirkland to fight Canelo, because it increases Canelo’s chances of winning tenfold.
This is similar to how De La Hoya matched Canelo against an out of shape Alfredo Angulo, who had to lose 40 plus pounds in a short period of time to take the fight. For boxing fans who remember that fight, they’ll know that Angulo looked incredibly weak for the fight, weaker than he’d ever been before in any of his fights.
What’s so bad about the Canelo-Kirkland fight is that many boxing fans thought that Canelo lost his last fight to Erislandy Lara last July. So instead of giving Lara a much-needed rematch, Canelo will be facing a rusty fighter who will need to lose a massive amount of weight during training camp in order to get ready for the fight. This kind of thing rubs fans the wrong way, because it comes across as blatant cherry picking.
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