De La Hoya says Canelo-Kirkland fight won’t have any running

By Boxing News - 05/07/2015 - Comments

1-CaneloKirklandWorkout1By Dan Ambrose: In what appears to be a shot at the Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Manny Pacquiao fight, promoter Oscar De La Hoya of Golden Boy Promotions says that this Saturday catch-weight fight between Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (44-1-1, 31 KOs) and James Kirkland (32-1, 28 KOs) won’t have any running when the two of them meet each other at Minute Maid Park in Houston, Texas.

De La Hoya is predicting the fight will be a slugfest from start to finish, and he could be right unless Canelo retreats to the ropes and fights defensively like he did in his fight against Austin Trout in 2013.

That was the fight where Trout hurt Canelo with a body shot in the 7th, causing Canelo to retreat to the ropes and stay there for the remainder of the 12 round bout.

“This fight is what the fans have been waiting for,” said Oscar via Fightnews.com. “Action in the ring, top fighters going for it, not afraid to fight.”

Canelo fights bravely against some opponents, but he doesn’t always look brave. If you look at him in his fights against Mayweather and Trout, Canelo didn’t fight well in either of those bouts, and he certainly didn’t look like an all-action fighter. Canelo attempted to rally and push the fight against Mayweather starting in the 9th round when he was hopelessly behind in the fight. That was the only part of the fight that Canelo fought aggressively.

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Whether the Canelo-Kirkland fight turns out to be an exciting, action-packed fight like De La Hoya is promising will depend largely on what Kirkland does in the ring. He’s going to be the one forcing the action all night long, not Canelo. I see Canelo moving, jabbing, and boxing all night long. He’s not going to come out slugging against Kirkland. I don’t see that happening. Kirkland hits too hard and Canelo doesn’t like to get hit, especially to the body. If Kirkland puts his shots together to the body, he could turn Canelo into a runner and have to chase him all night long.

“There will be no running in the ring on May 9, that’s for sure,” De La Hoya said. “Once that first bell rings, fans watching the action live from Minute Maid Park and on HBO World Championship Boxing won’t be able to look away until it’s over, whether by knockout or decision.”

I suspect that Canelo will win the fight, but I don’t see him being the aggressor in the fight or him meeting Kirkland in center ring looking to slug with him. I don’t see that happening because Canelo doesn’t do that against big sluggers unless they’re slow as molasses and weight drained like Alfredo Angulo was in their fight last year. If Kirkland isn’t weight drained, and there’s a real possibility that he will be, then I see Canelo boxing him and trying not to get hit with his best Mayweather imitation. Kirkland came into training camp weighing in the neighborhood of 200 pounds. This means that his training camp has been nothing short of a fat farm for him to take off a ton of weight in a real hurry. When you lost close to 50 pounds of flab in just eight weeks, it weakens you badly. I don’t care who it is, you end up weak when you take off the kind of weight that Kirkland has had to lose for this training camp. We saw how weak and weight-drained Angulo was in his fight against Canelo last year. Angulo was rumored to have taken off 45 pounds of fat during training camp, and we saw how weak he was against Canelo. De La Hoya is doing a good job of picking out Canelo’s opponents in getting guys that have put on a lot of weight and who have been out of the ring for extended amounts of time.



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