By Dam Ambrose: For some fighters, it’s great power or superb strategy as the reasons for them to win their fights. For WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (40-4, 33 KOs), he sees it as a case of him putting in the hard work for him to defeat the 25-year-old Canelo Alvarez in their fight this month on November 21st at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Cotto, 35, has been given his marching orders by his trusted and well-respected trainer Freddie Roach, and he plans on following those instructions to the letter. Roach likes to talk to the media a great deal, and he’s pretty much given away the strategy that they’ll be using to beat the hulking 170+ Canelo on 11/21.
Roach will have Cotto box Canelo, stay out of range, and use a hit and move strategy to get the better of him. Roach didn’t have to do much to come up with this plan. All he had to do was watch Canelo’s past fights against Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Erislandy Lara to note how slow Canelo’s feet were in both fights, and in how he struggled with their movement.
“The only way you can win a fight like this is working hard,” Cotto said to the latimes.com. “That’s what we can do here. Just working on anything Freddie wants me to do. That’s what I do. Every day,” Cotto said.
Unlike Roach, Cotto obviously isn’t too eager to give away his fight strategy to beat Canelo. It doesn’t matter though because Roach has already spilled the beans many times over by telling the media what the fight strategy will be for Canelo. Now it’s up to Canelo to try and come up with a plan to nullify what Cotto does in the ring.
I doubt that Canelo will be able to do anything to keep Cotto from boxing and moving the entire fight because when you have slow feet like Canelo, it’s impossible to speed those slow feet up.
Canelo is such a heavy fighter that it’s difficult for him to move around the ring for three minutes of every round. He’s someone that will likely be feeling the negative effects of having taken off 20 pounds to get down to the 155lb catch-weight for the fight.
When Canelo puts that weight back on on November 21st, he’s likely to feel sluggish once the fight goes past the 4th round. You can’t just shift that kind of weight in such a short period of time without it making you feel sluggish and not 100 percent.
“I don’t know anything about Canelo. I don’t pay attention to anything about how Canelo is training for this fight, how he’s looked,” Cotto said. “I’m just here to train and do my part.”
It makes sense that Cotto isn’t focusing on what Canelo is doing inside his training camp, because it doesn’t help him if he’s thinking about that kind of stuff. All he needs to do is figure out how to keep the 25-year-old Canelo from being able to pin him down to force him into a brawl.
Comments are closed.