By Dan Ambrose: Despite being the clear undercard, WBO junior middleweight champion Liam “Beefy” Smith (23-0-1, 13 KOs) is very confident about his chances of beating the red-haired Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (47-1-1, 33 KOs) on September 17 in their big fight on HBO pay-per-view. Smith is pleased knowing that he’s going to beat the 26-year-old Canelo and then be asked to give him a rematch, which he’ll gladly do for the right price.
Smith’s asking price will go up for the second time around when he gets Canelo inside the ring. A loss for Canelo will be a real downer for his career, because he can’t march forward with a loss to someone like Smith like he did after his defeat to Floyd Mayweather Jr. and his subsequent highly controversial decision win over Erislandy Lara.
Losing to Smith is not the kind of defeat Canelo can walk away from while telling the boxing world that he should have won. Canelo will have to fight Smith a second time.
“My mind is set on Canelo. When I beat Canelo, my next fight will be Canelo again,” Smith said to boxnation.com. “They will want the rematch. Me and Joe Gallagher have had a good camp. I know I can perform at this level. I’ve always been told I’ve got a style the Americans will like. What you see is what you get. I am coming to fight!”
Canelo’s main weaknesses are summed up to these areas:
Stamina: This is obviously the biggest flaw in Canelo’s game. He has terrible stamina, because he’s so big for the weight classes that he’s fighting in. After draining down all the weight to get to 154 or 155, he appears worn out from the process. Canelo then rehydrates and looks like a short 5’9” cruiserweight in the ring. He’ good for about six rounds if the fight is fought at a slow pace.
Weakness taking body punches: This is an area that Austin Trout and Mayweather both exposed in their fights with Canelo. They hit him in the bread basket and sent him retreating.
Poor mobility: Canelo cannot cut off the ring on his opponents. If you look at his fights against Mayweather and Erislandy Lara, Canelo looked like he was slogging through quicksand the entire 12 rounds of both of those fights. He could not handle the movement from either guy.
Smith has the type of fighting style that could give Canelo problems with his inside style of fighting. Smith likes to throw body shots and camp on the inside. I wouldn’t say that Smith is a better body puncher than Miguel Cotto, but he’s bigger than him at 5’10” and more willing to trade. Cotto didn’t do so well when he was fighting Canelp in close in their fight last November. Cotto spent most of the fight boxing Canelo rather than slugging it out with him. It worked for Cotto when he was on the outside, but he came forward to try and trade, that’s when he had problems due to Canelo being so much bigger than him.
We already know that Canelo has problems taking body shots. He was hurt by Austin Trout three years ago from a hard body shot that sent him scurrying for the ropes. Canelo then played turtle for the second half of the fight and was badly outworked by Trout. The judges must have been watching a different fight than the one I saw because I had Trout doing enough to get at least a draw if not a victory. Canelo had a huge crowd of over 30,000 fans cheering him on for the Trout fight on at the Alamodome in El Paso, Texas.
The judges scored the fight 117-111, 118-109 and 115-112. The scoring of the fight was scary bad, showing how tough it can be to defeat Canelo by a decision. The important thing for Liam Smith to learn from watching the Canelo-Trout fight wasn’t how poor the judging was but how Trout was able to hurt Canelo with a body shot, and how Canelo didn’t want to risk getting off the ropes after he was hurt.
Smith, 27, is a better body puncher than Trout, and he should be able to give Canelo a lot of problems if he sticks to just throwing to the body. If Smith wastes time trying to hurt Canelo with head shots, then he’s not going to win the fight. Canelo has a head like a tank with his ability to take shots without being hurt. But it’s a different story when Canelo gets hit to the body. He’s a lot more vulnerable, and Smith has to know by now this is Canelo’s Achilles heel. He can be hurt to the body but only to the body.
Smith has seen Canelo’s major weaknesses and he knows that he can get the better of him by pushing a really fast pace to force him to fight the full three minutes of each round. Even though Canelo is only 26, he cannot fight the full three minutes of each round. He grabs rest breaks by backing off to the outside or backing to the ropes when he gets really tired.
Canelo is usually fortunate to be fighting poor opponents that don’t have the intelligence to realize that he’s sneaking rest breaks to recoup. The only fighters that Canelo has fought that were smart enough to realize that he needed to take frequent rest breaks were Mayweather and Trout, and they both made it a point to attack Canelo hard each time he went up against the ropes.
Smith and his trainer Joe Gallagher have looked over Canelo’s past fights and they realize that the way to beat him is to force him to fight hard for the full three minutes of each round. When you make Canelo fight the whole time each round, he wears down like an old clock and quickly losses his gas. Unless you give him a break like Mayweather did, he gasses out even worse as the rounds go by. All Smith has to do is stay on top of Canelo and keep hitting him in the midsection all night long and he’ll have him on the canvas like his last opponent Predrag Radosevic.