By Jeff Aranow: Gennady “GGG” Golovkin’s trainer Abel Sanchez wasn’t in the mood to give too many compliments to Saul “Canelo” Alvarez 2 days after their fight last Saturday night in Las Vegas, Nevada. Sanchez says Canelo (49-1-2, 34 KOs) ran for the entire second half of the fight, and the Mexican crowd let him have it when it came to him being interviewed afterwards by booing him nonstop the entire time.
Sanchez says Canelo had promised that he was going to take the fight to Golovkin (37-0-1, 33 KOs) and try and knockout him out. Instead of doing that, Canelo got on his bike and moved frequently and fought a finesse oriented fight in front of the large crowd at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada.
“I thought we’d be able to stop him in the 10th or 11th round,” said Sanchez to Fighthub about GGG. “It wasn’t unforeseen that it could be a decision and we’d be going away with 3 or 4 points in the fight, which is what should have happened,” said Sanchez.
Golovkin didn’t throw enough punches at one time for him to knockout Canelo. Golovkin was mostly landing one or two shots, and jabbing Canelo. Golovkin was never going to knockout Canelo by fighting like that. Canelo has too good of a chin. The way that Golovkin needed to fight for him to have a chance of KO’ing Canelo would have been for him to open up with a flurry of shots without stopping like he did in the final 10 seconds of the fight in the 12th. When Golovkin did that, he had Canelo completely rattled.
Canelo lost his senses and started slapping with his shots, and not sitting down on his punches. In hindsight, that was how Golovkin needed to attack Canelo if he wanted to knock him out. He needed to throw nonstop punches without pulling back. He needed to stay in the pocket Aaron Pryor style and throw one shot after another without taking a break. Canelo couldn’t have withstood that kind of attack if Golovkin had fought him like that. Sanchez needs to look at the final seconds of the fight and use that as the tool for Golovkin to use as the blueprint in how to KO Canelo, as he’s never going to knock him out with the way he was fighting him last Saturday.
Golovkin doesn’t throw enough consecutive punches for him to KO Canelo. It would probably take at least 15 consecutive shots thrown by Golovkin without pulling back for him to knockout Canelo. Whether Golovkin can do that is the big question. He might not have the stamina, or he could be too hardwired to fight defensively for him to unload that many punches in a row.
”I think the reactions of the crowd once he got interviewed was indicative of what they thought what I thought,” said Sanchez in talking about how Canelo was booed by the boxing. ”They booed him. They booed him because he talked so much [expletive] before the fight about what he was going to do to Golovkin. He was going to knock him out. He was going to go at him. In order to knock somebody out, you have to fight. You’re going to have to exchange,” said Sanchez.
The crowd booed Canelo because he moved too much, and he wasn’t standing and fighting Golovkin enough. Seeing Canelo fight off the ropes looked bad. It wasn’t the Canelo that the boxing fans wanted to see. They had mixed up with someone else. Canelo fights off the ropes a lot in his fights unless he’s facing someone a lot smaller than himself like Miguel Cotto and Amir Khan. Canelo stayed in the center of the ring against those guys due his size advantage.
Canelo couldn’t do that to Golovkin, because he had the height, reach and power advantage over him. In addition to all that, Canelo had gassed out after the 4th round. He didn’t have the engine to fight hard in the center of the ring the way the crowd wanted him to. They thought mistakenly that Canelo was going to fight Golovkin in a one-on-one battle, but that’s not what he’s capable of doing due to his stamina problems. Even in Canelo’s fight against WBO junior middleweight champion Liam Smith last September, he fought with his back against the ropes against him. Canelo was tired in that fight. The weight that Canelo put on recently made it difficult for him to fight hard.
“It seemed like he ran for half of the fight, the last part of the fight,” said Sanchez about Canelo. “Yes, there were moments where he would stop, because he had no choice. He was tired, just to fire off a couple of shots. But Golokin was the pressure fighter. Golovkin was the one that got him up against the ropes. Golovkin was the one landing the jabs. Yeah, he was missing the right hands, but he was landing the more effective punches than the little flurries that Canelo was landing,” said Sanchez.
Canelo moved because he had to move. He wouldn’t have lasted long if he had stood in one place for the entire fight. He moved because he was tired, and he lost power on his shots when he was forced to throw a lot of punches at a time. That’s been a flaw in Canelo’s game since he first turned pro. Canelo throws a flurry of punches, but he then tires and needs to rest. The way to beat Canelo is what Jose Miguel Cotto did to him in their fight in 2010. The 5’5 ½” Jose unloaded on Canelo with a flurry of shots that had him on the verge of being knocked out. If Jose had more size or if he hadn’t emptied his gas tank while flurrying on Canelo, he would have had a good chance of knocking him out. Golovkin needed to do what Jose did in hitting Canelo with a lot of punches if he wanted to KO him.
“I think the crowd voiced their opinion when they announced it to be interviewed,” said Sanchez about the results of the Canelo-GGG being announced. ”I thought he ran for the most the last part of the fight,” said Sanchez.
Canelo did move an awful lot in the last 8 rounds of the fight. It wasn’t just the last 6 rounds that Canelo moved frequently. It was the last 8. Canelo was exhausted, and he looked it. Why the judges still gave Canelo a draw even with him looking that bad is unknown. The judges might have felt that Canelo was landing such nice shots that it cancelled out the jabs and the constant pressure that Golovkin was putting on him. They might have ignored that Canelo looked exhausted, and they focused more on just scoring the punches he was landing.
“The fight is over. Gennady is happy,” said Sanchez. “We did what we came to do. We’re still the champion. We knew coming into Vegas that these types of inconsistencies happen here for some unknown reason. All the judges must go to different judges’ schools, because there seems to be a variety of scores that it makes you wonder what the hell they’re watching. He wasn’t 100 percent happy,” said Sanchez about Golovkin. “There were other things that we could have and should have done, but they weren’t done. There were 2 guys in the ring. Canelo wanted to win too, and Canelo fought a great fight that he needed to fight to be in there and needed to box 12 rounds. That he didn’t do what he old everyone he was going to do, and the Mexicans voiced their opinions on it,” said Sanchez.
Golovkin is going to need to make a lot of improvements in his game if he wants to beat Canelo in the rematch. If he fights like he did last Saturday, he’ll either lose or end up with another draw. Golovkin needs to throw more punches to cancel out the harder shots that Canelo is landing to win the rounds. If Golovkin can stay on top of Canelo and hit him with 10 to 15 shots in a row, the judges won’t be able to ignore that. More importantly, Canelo won’t last long if Golovkin throws that many shots in a row.
