By Allan Fox: Gabriel Rosado sees this Saturday’s middleweight showdown between IBF/IBO/WBA/WBC champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin and WBA ‘regular’ champion Daniel Jacobs coming down to whether Jacobs can handle the punching power of Triple G. Rosado feels that Jacobs will win the fight if he can take the power of Golovkin, and smother his offense in some manner. Rosado doesn’t come right out and say it, but he seems to believe that Jacobs has the boxing skills to get the victory over Golovkin if he doesn’t get knocked out.
Rosado had his own fight against Golovkin in 2013, but he lost the fight by a 7th round knockout. Oddly enough, Rosado did his best in round 5 when he was slugging with Golovkin. He bruised both of Golovkin’s eyes in the round, and he had him looking tired. In rounds 1-4, 6 & 7, Rosado used his boxing skills and was no match. It was only when Rosado stopped moving around the ring and stood and fought Golovkin that he did well. At the start of round 6, Golovkin hurt Rosado with an uppercut to the head that put him back on his bike for the remainder of contest.
“It’s going to be a great fight,” said Rosado to esnewsreporting.com about the Golovkin-Jacobs fight. “It’s going to be a matter of whether Jacobs can take Triple G’s punching power. If Jacobs can take his punching power and smother Triple G, I see him pulling off a win. But if he can’t take his punching power, then it’s going to be a short night,” said Rosado about Jacobs.
Smothering Golovkin will not be easy for Jacobs to do, because it will require for him to stay close to Golovkin. Middleweight contender Willie Monroe Jr. gave that same advice to Jacobs. Monroe says that he had his best success in rounds 4 and 5 by staying close to Golovkin in their fight in 2015. Monroe Jr. landed some nice punches in both of those rounds. However, Monroe was standing close to Golovkin in round 6 when he was knocked down by the Kazakhstan fighter.
Staying close to Golovkin might not be the smartest thing for Jacobs to do if he’s going to have to eat shots. The 5’10 ½” is the shorter fighter, and he clearly has the better inside game than Jacobs. Unless Jacobs chooses to try and wrestle Golovkin into a state of exhaustion the way that Andre Ward wrestled Sergey Kovalev, it’s probably not going to work to smother his offense in that manner. Turning the fight into a wrestling match will require a referee that is asleep at the wheel in failing to do his job. What are the odds of a referee letting the Golovkin-Jacobs fight be turned into a wrestling contest like the Ward-Kovalev fight.
“Danny is the tougher opponent, and the sharper opponent,” said Jacobs’ trainer Andre Rozier to seconds.com. “Danny has nothing to lose. He will be winning on March 18th.”
Jacobs hasn’t really been involved in any fights where he’s had to dig deep to prove that he’s tougher than Golovkin. The only back and forth fight that Jacobs had that you can consider a grueling one was his first fight with Sergio Mora in which he had to get up off the deck in round 1 to score a stoppage in round 2. Mora was 36-years-old when that fight took place, and he wasn’t much of a puncher. The fact of the matter is, Jacobs doesn’t have the experience against high caliber opposition to say whether he’s tough or not.
Jacobs has only fought two or three good opponents his entire 10-year career. Jacobs does hit with shaper punches than Golovkin, but without the same kind of power. Jacobs has more speed, and that helps him land shots that his opponents don’t see. The reason why Jacobs hurt Peter Quillin in his 1st round knockout of him in 2015 was because Quillin was letting his own hands go at the time he was clipped.
Rosado will be fighting next month against past Golovkin knockout victim Martin Murray on April 22 at the Echo Arena in Liverpool, England.