By Scott Gilfoid: There are many different opinions in what game plan then bulked up welterweight Kell Brook should use for his fight against IBF/IBO/WBC middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin for their fight this Saturday. Most of the boxing fans and writers believe that Brook should spoil to try and frustrate Golovkin to beat him by a decision.
Johnny Nelson of Sky Sports believes that the best way for Brook to win is to go right after Golovkin in round one and look to slug it out. This is a strategy that would seem to work in Golovkin’s favor, considering that he likes to brawl with his opponents.
Golovkin didn’t just bulk up the way Brook did by packing on a lot of extra muscle weight. This means that in a fight that is exhausting affair, Golovkin will have a huge advantage over Brook, because he didn’t gain weight for this fight. Brook is the one that packed on the pounds for the contest, and his cardiovascular system will likely be screaming out for a rest break after two o three hard rounds on Saturday night.
Brook and Golovkin will be fighting this Saturday night on September 10 at the O2 Arena in London, England.
“If I was Dominic Ingle, Kell’s trainer, I would tell him to get in there and jump on him straight away, because if you’ve got two gunslingers exchanging shots, it makes the fight more equal,” said Nelson to skysports.com.
Oh man, this sounds like a really dumb idea that Nelson has. I wonder where he came up with that useless idea for Brook? I got an idea; attack Golovkin right away and hope for the best. That is about a useless mess of an idea that I’ve heard yet for the Golovkin-Brook fight. But in a way, it might help Brook in the long run win boxing fans. I mean, if Brook is going to lose the fight anyway, wouldn’t it look better if he goes out on his shield by looking brave in front of the entire world rather than being seen spoiling with his holding and running until the bitter end? I’m just saying.
Brook can out like a hero by standing and slugging with Golovkin or he can be seen running around the ring or using his clinching style of fighting and then get knocked out anyway. If it were me, I would want to look my best, especially if I knew I had no real chance of winning. That’s me though. I would see the big picture. I don’t think Brook is that type of person. I think Brook is someone that will try any trick in the book to try and survive the full 12 rounds so that he can maybe get lucky with the judges giving him a decision.
“Jump on from the off, keep him off-key, don’t let him plant that front foot,” said Nelson. “You saw him yesterday at the public workout. He planted the ball of his foot down and let so many shots off, straight shots, power shots. If he can’t get on that front foot, he doesn’t get the power in.”
If Brook starts throwing a lot of shots, he’s going to be leaving himself open to being countered. Brook’s defense is not impregnable. Even in his last mismatch against Kevin Bizier, Brook was getting hit back by him. Bizier was just not able to take the power from the much bigger Brook, who looked like a middleweight in the ring that night. The size difference between the two fighters looked significant. Bizier was never going to win that fight against Brook unless he could take the fight into the deeper rounds of the contest. That wasn’t going to happen though because he couldn’t handle Brook’s weight advantage.
Nelson must not have seen too many of Golovkin’s fights for him to think that he can only punch hard when he’s planning his feet. Golovkin punches hard even when he’s off balance. Look at his fight against Martin Murray from last year. Murray was running the entire fight, and this prevented Golovkin from being able to sit down on his shots. However, he still was nailing Murray while he was running past him in wide circles.
Golovkin even knocked Murray down with a stabbing jab to the midsection while he was running. Golovkin DOES NOT need to plant his feet in order to hurt Brook. He can hurt him even when he’s off balance. It doesn’t matter with Triple G.
“This is the most confident I have seen Kell Brook and I think the weight has made a massive difference to his self-belief as an individual,” said Nelson.
I don’t buy into the self-confidence bit with fighters. I’ve seen a ton of fighters that were as confident as heck, and yet they still were blasted out once they got inside the ring. There is such a thing as false confidence. Even if the confidence is real, it just makes the fighter look deluded in my view.
There’s a reason why you’re supposed to be afraid when doing something where you have very little chance of success. If you have no fear, then tells me that you’re foolhardy. If Brook isn’t seriously worried about the Golovkin fight, then I think his confidence isn’t an asset at all. I think it’s self-deception that will lead him down a rocky road in this fight and in the remainder of his career. Personally, I don’t believe that Brook’s confidence is real, because we saw how he fought Shawn Porter in 2014 by holding him all night long.
A confident fighter would have actually fought Porter, but Brook didn’t do that. He stalled out the fight by clinching nonstop for the round fight. I wouldn’t be surprised if two minutes of every round had Brook holding and just not letting Porter throw punches. You don’t see that kind of holding from confident fighters.
Look at all the greats in boxing from the past. When they fought the top guys, they didn’t choose to use a gimmick of holding 10+ times per round to keep their opponents from throwing punches. They actually fought them. As such, I think Brook isn’t confident going into the Golovkin fight, and I definitely DO NOT see Brook following Nelson’s advice of jumping on Golovkin from the start of the fight. Coming events cast their shadows before. I think we’re going to see Brook revert back to the tired only fight strategy of nonstop clinching that he used in the Porter fight from 2014.
I think Brook will be hoping that the referee doesn’t do his job by disqualifying him for the excessive clinching. If Brook does get disqualified, then he can squawk about how he didn’t deserve to be thrown out of the fight because he was hardly holding. Gosh, I hope I don’t see that from Brook. It would be so, so sad to see him trying to convince the boxing world that he didn’t deserve to be disqualified. It would be bad news. That’s why I think Brook would be better off going out like a hero by slugging against Golovkin rather than choosing to hold all night long and winding up getting disqualified.