By Dan Ambrose: Fresh off his win over the way past his best 35-year-old Paulie Malignaggi in August of this year, unbeaten #2 WBC welterweight contender Danny Garcia (31-0, 18 KOs) will be fighting next month on January 23rd against 32-year-old #6 WBC Robert Guerrero (33-3-1, 18 KOs) at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, California.
The Garcia-Guerrero fight will be shown on Premier Boxing Champions on Fox. Middleweight Gabriel Rosado sees this fight as a one-sided blowout for the 5’8” Garcia. Rosado doesn’t say why he feels it will be a blow out other than him thinking that Garcia is a super talented fighter.
Garcia didn’t blowout his last opponent Malignaggi or his opponent before that in Lucas Matthysse. The guys that Garcia has blown out in recent years were smaller fighters than himself like little Rod Salka, a lightweight dragged up to welterweight to fight him, and an aging Erik Morales.
Those weren’t fights where Garcia was facing guys that were at the same weight as him. Morales was little more than an aging 36-year-old blown up super bantamweight when he fought Garcia for the second time in 2012. If one day Danny Garcia is still fighting when he’s 36, it would be interesting to see him fight someone four divisions above where he started fighting at just see how well he’d do. My guess is Garcia would be obliterated.
“I see him [Danny Garcia] blowing out Guerrero,” Rosado said to Fighthype. “Danny’s a tough fighter. He’s undefeated. He’s just go an attitude that nobody can beat him. I see him blowing Guerrero out. When you look at the welterweight division, Danny’s fresh in that class. He’s a smarter fighter than people give him credit for. I see him doing really well in the welterweight division,” Rosado said.
Guerrero doesn’t have the punching power to give Garcia problems, but he does have the pressure style of fighting. If Guerrero can force Garcia backwards the entire 12 round fight, he might beat him. Lamont Peterson made the mistake of starting his own pressuring of Garcia too late in the fight by waiting until the second half of the contest before putting him under fire. If Guerrero can pressure Garcia from the first round and take his heavy left hooks without getting hurt, he could score an upset win. I don’t think he will, but it’s possible. Guerrero need to deal with constant clinching and low blows from Garcia if he starts finding success, because Garcia used those tactics in his win over Lucas Matthyse.
I don’t believe that Garcia is going to be able to destroy Guerrero the way that Rosado thinks he will. Guerrero has a good chin and will likely take the left hooks that Garcia hits him with all night long, even though Guerrero started his career out as a featherweight and isn’t a legit welterweight.
I think Guerrero will still be able to take the punishment that the 27-year-old Garcia dishes out in this fight. I do agree that Garcia will win the fight, because Guerrero has taken too much punishment in his last four fights against Floyd Mayweather Jr, Yoshihiro Kamegai, Keith Thurman and Aaron Martinez.
I think Guerrero is pretty much a shot fighter at this point and does not belong in the ring with any top welterweight. That’s not to say that Guerrero can’t find success if he were to move down to 135 and 140, where his size would help him, but I don’t think he’s going to find success at 147. Besides the punishment that Guerrero absorbed in his last four fights, he wasn’t helped by the year that he sat out of the ring after his loss to Mayweather in 2013. Choosing to lose a year of his career wasn’t the smartest thing for Guerrero to do.
Let’s be real about Danny Garcia; I don’t see him being anything more than future paper champion. It’s clear that Garcia is being angled to win the vacant WBC welterweight title, but I don’t think for a second that Garcia is going to be able to hold onto that title for any length of time. We’ve already seen Garcia’s limits as a fighter in his questionable wins over Mauricio Herrera and Lamont Peterson.
Garcia lost those fights despite the controversial victories that were given to him. It’s Garcia’s prerogative to choose not to clear up the controversy surrounding those fights by electing not to give rematches to those fighters, but the limitations in Garcia’s game will be exposed in the future when he fights even better fighters like Errol Spence Jr. and Shawn Porter. Garcia won’t be able to avoid fighting those guys, and it’s doubtful that he’ll continue to get questionable wins for an entire career.
Comments are closed.