By Scott Gilfoid: Dominic Ingle, the trainer for unbeaten welterweight belt holder Kell “Special K” Brook (36-0, 25 KOs), says he’s spotted aging in 34-year-old IBF/IBO/WBA/WBC middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin (35-0, 32 KOs) that he thinks his fighter can take advantage of this Saturday night on September 10 at the O2 Arena in London, England.
Ingle says he looked at how Golovkin has appeared in his last two fights against Dominic Wade and David Lemieux, and he says he’s getting hit more and looking slower. Ingle thinks the 30-year-old Brook will be able to take full advantage of the slower Golovkin when he gets inside the ring with him on the night.
Ingle doesn’t say anything about Golovkin’s punching power, so you would have to assume that he hasn’t spotted with his eagle eyes a drop off on his power. As far as I can tell, Golovkin’s punching power would seem to be the major issue that Brook is going to have inside the ring on Saturday. I mean, Golovkin has never had great hand speed even back in his amateur days. What made him so good was his punching power, timing, jab, intelligence and ring generalship.
“[Martin] Murray is a big guy, a tough guy and had been in tough fights. He knew what he was up against in Golovkin and back then, Golovkin was an animal but watching his last couple of fights he seems to be slowing down,” said Ingle to skysports.com. “He’s taken one or two more shots and with Kell being younger, fresh and with ambition, that’ll be the decider on the night.”
I think Ingle is babbling to try and get into Golovkin’s head. There has no drop off in Golovkin’s performance whatsoever. I don’t know what Ingle is talking about, because Golovkin was barely touched in his last fight against Dominic Wade last April in his 2nd round knockout win. I think Golovkin intentionally let himself get hit so that he could close enough to KO Wade, but he was barely hit at all in that fight before it was over in round two.
In Golovkin’s fight against former IBF middleweight champion David Lemieux last October, Golovkin pitched a near shutout in jabbing the shorter-armed Canadian at will until stopping him with body shots in the 8th round. I think Ingle is trying to grasp onto anything to give Brook a boost and to try and plant seeds of doubt into Golovkin’s mind. I’m just surprised Ingle stopped at saying Golovkin is getting older. I’m sure he could have said a lot more, but I guess he’s hoping that he can get to him mentally with the age bit.
Golovkin can certainly fire back at Ingle by pointing out that he doesn’t appear to be the great master of putting together solid game plans like some people think. I mean, how hard is to put together a game plan where you have Brook clinching all night long against Shawn Porter in their fight in 2014. I could have come up with the same strategy on a hotel napkin. Honestly, that was probably Ingle’s best strategy for Brook in his career as far as I’m concerned, and how much genius does it take to have your fighter hold all night long. If Porter knew how to deal with excessive clinching back then, he would have easily beaten Brook, because that was the only thing he had going for him in the fight. If the referee had decided to control Brook’s clinching in the fight, he would have been lost out there because he would have to deal with Porter’s superior inside game. Brook doesn’t know how to fight on the inside. He never did any fighting in the Porter fight when they were on the inside. It was pure clinching and the referee didn’t do anything to stop it, which he should have. It was pretty sad actually to watch that.
“We’re not going to give the game away,” said Ingle. “Golovkin has his idea of what he’s going to do – he’s going to come out and seek and destroy. He might stand back a bit and look at Brook to see what he’s got but we’ve always got a plan for these big fights.”
What game plan is Ingle talking about? I can pretty much predict what Ingle’s game plan is going to be for the Golovkin fight on Saturday.
Ingle’s game plan for Brook will likely come down to these things:
Plan A: Clinch nonstop and hope referee doesn’t do his job correctly by penalizing and/or disqualifying Brook for excessive clinching.
Plan B: Have Brook use the old ‘punch and grab’ technique to prevent Golovkin from being able to get his shots off. In other words, Brook will throw a single jab or power shot and then immediately fall forward to gab Golovkin in a clinch. This is basically what Brook was using in his fight against Porter all night long in 2014. The referee didn’t do anything about it to stop the clinching.
Plan C: Running. Brook may choose to run around the ring all night long, jabbing and throwing single pot shots. With as heavy and slow looking as Brook is right now, I think this plan is going to be very hard for him to carry out. Brook will likely get very, very tired from running because he’s never been a runner before in the past, and he’s got so much more size now on his frame due to him bulking up needlessly. It’s a lot harder to run than it is to stalk. That means that Golovkin will use far less energy in moving forward than Brook will in moving laterally all night long. As such, Brook will eventually get exhausted from his useless movement and wind up getting caught, bludgeoned, and stopped in that order. It’s going to be brutal for Brook if he chooses to run, because he’s going to get tired and caught by Golovkin sooner or later. I’d say more sooner than later due to GGG’s fine ability to cut off the ring on his opponents.
Plan D: Standing in the pocket and trading. While I see there being a remote possibility that Brook will flip to this strategy in the fight, I do think he may be forced into this strategy when things start looking bleak for him. It’ll be one of those ‘last stand’ type of things that you see in war where troops are cut off, encircled and with no other choice but to fight it out. When it gets to this point in the fight, the ending will be near for Brook. He’ll have already quickly rifled through Ingle’s Plan-A, B, and C and realized that he’s hopelessly over-matched and that he’s to be overrun by Golovkin. Once it gets to this point, Brook will try bravely to slug it out before he’s blasted to smithereens by Golovkin.
I think Brook will be going to pieces mentally inside the ring in losing his senses completely the way some fighters do when things are quickly getting of hand for them. Instead of Brook using his brain, I think he’s going to be wildly throwing shots due to the stress involved. I think his form will revert back to his early days in boxing when he first laced up a pair of gloves. I wouldn’t be surprised if Brook is just wind-milling shots in desperation to keep Golovkin off of him before he puts him. Golovkin will then finish off Brook quickly by putting him out of his misery with a huge shot to the head or body. I doubt that Ingle will even have time to get his white towel ready to throw into the ring to save Brook from getting blasted out.
This fight is going to end badly for Brook in my view. Golovkin is too powerful, too experienced and too lated for Brook. Ingle can talk about Golovkin having supposedly slowed down recently, but I think Ingle should be more concerned with how much Brook has slowed down since putting on all that useless weight to bulk up for the fight. Heck, Brook looks incredibly slow and all swelled up like he put too much weight on too quickly. It’s too late now for Brook to lose the useless weight. All he can do is try and go back to the same old tired playbook that he used for the Porter fight by looking to clinch all night long and hope that the referee lets him and hope that Golovkin doesn’t have a clue how to deal with nonstop holding. I don’t see clinching working for Brook, but I think that’s about all he can do in this fight. He’s too big and swollen from putting on all this weight. He’s not going to be able to fight effectively as big as he is now. I think it was a blow it move by Ingle to have Brook put on that fight. If I was Brook’s trainer, I would have kept him lean so that he could use what little hand speed that he has to try and win. Brook isn’t fast normally, but he’s even slower now that he’s bulked up for the fight. It was a dumb idea for Brook to bulk up. I wonder if that was Ingle’s brilliant idea.