(Photo credit Top Rank/Chris Farina) By Dan Ambrose: WBO welterweight champion Tim Bradley’s new trainer Teddy Atlas says he’s spent a lot of time with Bradley studying video of former WBA lightweight champion Brandon Rios’ past fights in order to scout out the weaknesses in his game so that they can capitalize on it when the two fighters face each other on HBO on November 7th at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Atlas is seen by Bradley as a wise trainer that can help him beat the top guys like Rios. However, Bradley is going to need to fight a lot better than he has recently in his last three fights because he’s put in uneven performances in his last three fights against Jessie Vargas, Diego Chaves and Manny Pacquiao.
Bradley has looked good and bad in all of those fights. Those were fights where Bradley had to fight full bore to win, and he arguably lost 2 of them.
“We looked at a lot of video of Rios to take a look at how he moves and his tendencies,” Atlas said. “Tim did his job to prepare for Rios He knows what it takes and what we have to do to win on November 7. Tim is ready to fight. We both know what it takes to win – total focus for 12 complete rounds – to win this fight,” Atlas said.
Bradley is going to have a real tough time trying to deal with Rios’s power and pressure in this fight. Bradley is definitely faster than him and more mobile, but I don’t think that’s going to be enough for him to get the win. Rios is going to put pressure on Bradley the entire fight, and this is going to force him to move around the ring for the entire 12 rounds.
Bradley was able to move constantly against Juan Manuel Marquez two years ago, but Marquez didn’t put a lot of pressure on him in that fight. Marquez waited too much for Bradley to come to him, and when he did come at him, he would hit and then move away quickly to the outside.
It was a poor game plan for Marquez because he should have known going into the fight that he needed to put a lot of pressure on Bradley in order to win. Marquez made the mistake of assuming that Bradley would fight him the same way he fought Ruslan Provodnikov in his previous fight in March 2013.
When Bradley didn’t use that fighting style, Marquez failed to make adjustments by applying the necessary pressure to win the fight. Rios at least is ahead of the game in knowing what he’ll need to do in order to get the victory. He’s not going to going into the Bradley fight expecting him to stand and trade with him, but if he does decide to slug it out, Rios will be ready for that too.
Atlas might lose his cool in this fight if Bradley fails to find success with his instructions. It’ll be interesting to see what mind tricks Atlas uses to try and motivate Bradley properly.
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