Roach: Golovkin beats Canelo if the fight happens

By Boxing News - 12/16/2015 - Comments

Boxing: Golovkin vs LemieuxBy Dan Ambrose: Trainer Freddie Roach believes that Gennady Golovkin (34-0, 31 KOs) will beat WBC middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (46-1-1, 32 KOs) if the fight takes place in the future. Roach thinks that Golovkin could be the No.1 pound-for-pound fighter in the sport today, but he just can’t prove it because there are so few fighters that want to face him right now.

Roach thinks that Golovkin’s promoters at K2 Promotions wasted a lot of time with his career by choosing to keep in Germany fighting for many years after he turned pro. It wasn’t until 2010 that Golovkin started fighting in the U.S off and on.

“I like Golovkin a lot. I think he’s a very clever,” Roach said to Fighthub. “I still like Triple G to win that fight if it does happen. The bad thing about that is he doesn’t have a lot of opponents. A lot of guys don’t want to fight him. He’s the real deal. I think he may be one of the best pound-for-pound fighters in the world today right now. He could be the best. The thing is he hasn’t had the competition to show that yet,” Roach said.

If Roach thinks that Golovkin beats Canelo, then there’s a pretty good chance that Canelo’s promoter Oscar De La Hoya thinks he could lose to. De La Hoya is a good judge of fighters and he knows what they’re capable of doing. De La Hoya obviously saw Canelo’s loss to Floyd Mayweather Jr. and his struggles in fights against Erislandy Lara and Austin Trout.

De La Hoya can’t possibly really believe that Canelo has improved much since those fights, because he looked as flawed in his last fight against Miguel Cotto than he did in those fights. The only real difference that I could see in Canelo was he appeared to be bigger in weight than he’d ever been before. Canelo looked like he was in 180s to me, and there was no way that the 160lb+ Cotto was going to be able to beat a guy that outweighed him by as much as Canelo appeared to.

It’s still remains to be seen whether Canelo will fight Golovkin in 2016. The two fighter’s promoters are supposed to sit down for negotiations in late May 2016 after the two fighters take voluntary fights. But if the negotiations don’t go well, then there’s a very real chance that we won’t see them fighting each other in 2016. Hoya recently said to HBO’s Jim Lampley that he plans on letting the Canelo-Golovkin fight “marinate” for a while.

De La Hoya didn’t say how long he plans on letting the fight marinate. He says he doesn’t want to wait too long because he thinks that one of them could lose at some point. The chances are higher that Canelo gets beaten again at some point because he’s already beaten by Floyd Mayweather Jr., and he dodged a bullet in fights against Austin Trout and Erislandy Lara.

Hopefully the Canelo vs. Golovkin fight does take place soon before Golovkin gets much older. It would be a shame if De La Hoya choose to wait until Golovkin ages to the point where he’s harmless to Canelo.

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Canelo’s promoter Eric Gomez of Golden Boy Promotions says they’ll be meeting in early January to decide on who his next opponent will be for May 7th, 2016. This is the Cinco de Mayo holiday weekend. Gomez says that Canelo does want to fight Golovkin.

“Canelo does want it,” Gomez said to RingTV.com about Canelo wanting the Golovkin fight. “It will happen. And next for Canelo? May 7 is the date. As far as opponent goes, Canelo is on vacation. We’ve agreed we’ll all meet up the second week of January to discuss that. Every and all of them we will consider. We will take our time, go through the list with due diligence.”

Canelo will be defending his WBC middleweight title, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that he’ll defend it against a middleweight. It depends on who De La Hoya and Gomez can get for the fight. With Canelo’s popularity, he can probably get pretty much anyone he wants, even fighters from Top Rank. But if Golden Boy wants to prepare him properly for a fight against Golovkin, then they need to be thinking about putting him in with a good middleweight rather than pooling from the welterweight division to match him against Amir Khan or Tim Bradley.



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