Canelo will be in trouble against Golovkin if he boxes him says Kelley

By Boxing News - 08/14/2017 - Comments

Image: Canelo will be in trouble against Golovkin if he boxes him says Kelley

By Dan Ambrose: Former featherweight champion Kevin Kelley thinks Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (49-1-1, 34 KOs) will be in serious trouble against Gennady “GGG” Golovkin (37-0, 33 KOs) if he chooses to box him the way that he did former IBF 160 lb. champion David Lemieux in their fight 2 years ago.

Kelley thinks Golovkin’s reach, size and his power will be too much for Canelo if he decides he wants to box him from the outside. If Golovkin uses his power jab, Canelo is going to be pretty much helpless in this fight.

Kelley sees Canelo as having to fight a very smart fight, use his hand speed, and make him miss with his shots for him to win. Canelo must counter punch Golovkin at every turn defeat the bigger, stronger fighter from Kazakhstan. Lemieux has an even better left hook that Canelo, and Golovkin completely took that punch away from Lemieux by jabbing him from the outside.

Lemieux never had the opportunity to land his left hooks, because Golovkin stayed on the outside and jabbed him for the entire fight. When Lemieux would try and close the distance to land his left, Golovkin would back up and jab at the same time.

Lemieux would get hit with jab and stop trying to attack GGG. Lemieux stopped trying to even come forward after getting hit with Golovkin’s jabs frequently in the first 4 rounds. From the 5th round on, Lemieux fought like he was just waiting to see if Golovkin would make a mistake and get near enough for him to land his big left hook. Golovkin wasn’t going to do that. He was too smart.

“I think it’s a heck of a fight,” said Kevin Kelley to Fighthub about the Canelo-GGG fight. “I think Canelo is going to bring a heck of a fight to Triple G, as long as Triple G wants it. I think if Triple G boxes him like he boxed David Lemieux, Canelo could be in serious trouble. Golovkin is the winner already. He’s too big. He has a longer reach. Canelo is a slapper pretty much,” said Kelley.

If Golovkin plans on using his jab as his number 1 game plan for Canelo, then this fight is going to end up a lot like the Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Canelo fight from 2013. Mayweather showed that Canelo doesn’t have the arm length to jab with him and reach him with his power shots. Canelo’s jab is subpar compared to other fighters in the 160-lb. division.

The two things that Canelo is good at are throwing fast combinations and landing his left hook counter puncher. As most boxing fans know, left hooks only work when a fighter is in close range. Canelo can’t land a left hook when his opposition are on the outside. That’s one of the reasons why Mayweather beat him so easily. Canelo’s bread and butter punch is his left hook. If you take that away from him by standing on the outside and jabbing, he’s a very mediocre fighter. To be brutally honest, Canelo isn’t even as good as Miguel Cotto when he’s on the outside. At least with Cotto, he has an excellent jab and he can compete with fighters that stay on the outside. Canelo can’t do that. He needs his opponents to throw power shots and get close enough for him to land his left hook counter punch.

If Golovkin does decide to stay disciplined and jab Canelo for 12 rounds, then this won’t be a fight. It’ll be same one-sided affair that we saw in Golovkin’s one-sided win over former IBF middleweight champion David Lemieux in October 2015. Golovkin took advantage of Lemieux’s short arms to jab him at will from the outside to soften him up before knocking him out in the 8th round.

Lemieux is like a better version of Canelo in my opinion. Lemieux is more powerful, and more suited to the middleweight division. Golovkin already beat Canelo 2.0 in Lemieux, and he did an excellent job of doing it. Canelo will never be as good as Lemieux at middleweight, because he’s not built for the division. Lemieux is made for the middleweight division. Canelo is not and never will be.

Canelo is at a big disadvantage in this fight, because he’s going it into without any true experience in the middleweight division. Although Canelo has a good degree of experience against some of the fighters from yesterday in the junior middleweight division, he’s faced no one from the middleweight division. Canelo beat Miguel Cotto when he held the WBC 160 lb. title, but that wasn’t against a real middleweight. Cotto was just a small junior middleweight that beat an old fighter with a bad knee in 40-year-old Sergio Martinez o claim the WBC title in 2014. If Cotto had to face Golovkin for the WBC title, it would have been bad been for Cotto. So, Canelo is going into the GGG with nothing on his resume that has prepared him for this fight, and that’s never a good thing to do. Fighters need to take the prerequisite fights to get ready for stiff challenges when moving up to a new weight class. You can’t say that Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., Liam Smith and Amir Khan were the type of fights that Canelo should have taken to get ready for Golovkin.

”When he fought [Julio Cesar] Chavez Jr., he never hurt Chavez Jr. He never really hurt [Miguel] Cotto,” said Kelley in commenting on Canelo’s fights with those two fighters. ”I don’t think Canelo shows any real strengths for Triple G. Chavez was standing there and taking pretty much every punch that he had. If that was Triple G, it would have been over with the same punches. That’s the difference between the two when it comes to punching power. Triple G is dominant,”

Golovkin was laughing at how Canelo was unable to knockout Chavez Jr. Golovkin didn’t understand why the 27-year-old Canelo couldn’t knock out Chavez Jr. with the state that he was in for that fight. Golovkin said that Chavez Jr. “had nothing” for that fight, and yet Canelo couldn’t knock him out with his shots. That fight showed the boxing world that Canelo’s punching power didn’t up with him from his 155-lb. catch-weight class that he created for himself in the last several years.

Canelo’s power didn’t come up with him. It was like watching Mikey Garcia move up from lightweight to light welterweight against Adrien Broner, and finding out that he’s not going to ever be a big puncher at 140. Canelo will never have major power at 160. That much is clear. For Canelo to have power, he’s going to need to go back down to 154 and hope that he can continue to make that weight without draining himself.

At 160, Canelo is too weak to stand and trade. The only way Canelo beats guys like Golovkin, Jermall Charlo and Danny Jacobs if he out-boxes them to win decisions. That’s going to be hard for Canelo to outbox those three fighters, because they know what his weakness is now. Canelo cannot fight from the outside. He needs to have his opponent’s pressure him or he needs to pressure them. If they stay on the outside and keep him from getting close, Canelo doesn’t stand a chance of beating them unless you get wacky scoring like in the Canelo vs. Erislandy Lara fight.

He’s got to box very well,” said Kelley about Canelo. “The whole thing with the fight is strategy. If Canelo goes in the ring and he can box Triple G, and maybe he can be fast enough to make him miss and make him pay, he could pull off a win. But realistically in my view, good luck. I wish him the best, but he’s going to have to fight smart. He can’t fight with ego. Pride will get him in trouble,” said Kelley.

For Canelo to win, Golovkin will need to fight his fight by staying close to him so that he can land his left hook counters, and take advantage of his faster hands. Even with that kind of fight, it’s going to be awfully tough for Canelo. Golovkin hits hard and he doesn’t mind missing with his punches. We saw Kell Brook using all kinds of head movement to avoid Golovkin’s shots, but he couldn’t avoid them all. When Golovkin went to the body in round 5, Brook stopped defending his head and was a sitting duck. Brook was clearly hurt by a right-hand body shot that Golovkin had hit him with.

Canelo likes to imitate Floyd Mayweather Jr. with the way he uses his head and upper body movement to avoid shots. It might work to avoid head shots, but he’s not going to be able to avoid all the shots. When Canelo leans backwards, his midsection is still there to be hit. That’s the problem with being a short fighter with a wide body. Canelo will never be able to avoid getting hit to the body. He can only hope that Golovkin doesn’t hit him there, because I believe that’s his Achilles heel. Canelo does not take body shots nearly as well as he does shots to the head. Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Austin Trout both hurt Canelo with punches to the body. Those guys can’t punch anywhere near as hard as Golovkin.

”I’m impressed with Triple G, because he was a phenomenal amateur as well,” said Kelley. ”He can box and punch, and he can take a punch. He’s got a lot of knowledge also. I do believe there’s weakness, but I’m having trouble finding that right now. Judge his best fight and his worst fight, and he’s somewhere in the middle. That’s what Triple G is. So, I don’t judge the Jacobs fight. I don’t judge the Kell Brook fight. In the Kell Brook fight, Brook had a great performance, but he’s quick. Speed might kill Triple G’s boxing style, but until somebody gets in there, we don’t know,” said Kelley.

Brook had his moments against Golovkin in round 2 when he threw some combinations, but that was the only round where he did an excellent job. Golovkin didn’t get warmed up until round 3. When Golovkin came out for the third, he immediately knocked Brook down with a big shot. The late referee Marlon Wright ruled it as a slip, but Brook looked shaken from the knockdown. He wasn’t the same after that. Golovkin later hit Brook with a huge right hand to the head in the same round.

Brook came unglued from that point, and he got completely flustered. In the Golovkin-Jacobs fight, Jacobs was too afraid to try and until the 7th round. Jacobs gave away the first 6 rounds on the Boxing News 24 scorecards, and he was knocked down in round 4. Jacobs did win some rounds in the second half of the fight, but he also clearly lost some rounds as well. The fight wasn’t as close as the judges scored it. Golovkin won the fight 9 rounds to 3 in my scoring, and that was with him choosing to box instead of slug. If Golovkin uses his jab against Canelo, then this fight is going to be one-sided. Jacobs couldn’t do anything against Golovkin when he was jabbing him, even though he was taller, heavier and had the longer reach than him. Jacobs still was unable to deal with Golovkin’s power jab. It’s good of a jab. It really is.

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