By Dan Ambrose: Trainer Freddie Roach says he’s been watching a lot of video on former WBA/WBC 154 pound champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (45-1-1, 32 KOs), and he thinks that his fighter WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (40-4, 33 KOs) can definitely beat the 24-year-old Canelo.
Roach understands that his fighter will be the smaller guy when he gets inside the ring with the 170+ pound Canelo when they face each other in October or November on HBO pay-per-view, but Roach still thinks Cotto has more than enough punching power to beat Canelo if he designs the perfect game plan for him to win.
In other words, Cotto won’t beat Canelo unless Roach puts together the best overall plan and Cotto follows it to the letter.
“It’s a tough fight, but I do think Miguel’s big enough and strong enough to beat him,” Roach said to Northjersey.com. “We’d have to fight a perfect fight, but I think we’re very capable of doing that. I’ve thought about that fight a lot and I’ve watched a lot of tape on the opponent.”
I wasn’t that impressed with Cotto’s catch-weight fight against Daniel Geale last Saturday night. Cotto seemed to hurt Geale first with a head-butt that stunned him. Cotto then followed up with a left hook to the head that dropped the 34-year-old Australian. But I think it was the initial head-butt from Cotto that hurt Geale, putting him in a defenseless position where he wasn’t prepared for the follow up left hook.
Roach’s fighter Manny Pacquiao recently was beaten by Floyd Mayweather Jr. last May in a fight that was largely one-sided. But what jumps out at you about that fight was how Roach had no plan-B for the 36-year-old Pacquiao to fall back on when things started getting out of hand in the 2nd half of the fight. Like with the Cotto-Canelo fight, Roach had bragged about how he’d watched tons of tape on Mayweather, and how he had multiple backup game plans for Pacquiao to use if the initial one didn’t work well.
We didn’t see that though from Roach. It was all very basic stuff from the 55-year-old trainer with him simply telling Pacquiao to put more pressure on Mayweather. I think we could see the same with the Cotto vs. Canelo fight. Roach will talk a lot before the fight about how he’s got a zillion back up plans for Cotto to employ, but if things start going badly for the soon to be 35-year-old Puerto Rican fighter, it wouldn’t be at all surprising to see Roach looking confused and unsure which direction to go in.
Roach seems to have his fighters with one plan for their fights, which is usually for them to put a lot of pressure on their opponents. When that one plan fails to work, Roach has nothing else to fall back on for his fighters.
“I do like that fight. I think it’s a great fight for us,” Roach said. “It’s a great fight for boxing. Its two really good fighters going at it. That’s what we want to see. I will get Miguel ready for that fight and I feel that we will win that fight.”
Roach also thinks that he could come up with the perfect game plan for Cotto to defeat WBA middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin. But then in the next breath, Roach says that Golovkin brings nothing to the table because he’s not a popular PPV type fighter. So in other words, Roach is saying Cotto could beat Golovkin with his game plan, but he won’t fight him because he’s not popular enough. That makes it really easy for Roach to talk because his fighter doesn’t have to back it up in the ring against Golovkin.
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