By Jim Dower: Gennady Golovkin is looking very sharp, speedy and powerful in his training to knockout Saul Canelo Alvarez in their rematch on September 15. Golovkin (38-0-1, 34 KOs) and Alvarez worked out for the media last Sunday at the Bank of California Stadium in Los Angeles, California.
While Canelo looked fast and compact, Golovkin showed more punching power and seemed to be throwing more combinations than in workouts from his past fights. This is a hint that GGG plans on using a high volume attack to defeat Canelo in the rematch on HBO PPV at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. Canelo, 28, fought well last time against GGG, doing well with the slow measured pace that the Kazakhstan fighter fought at. If Golovkin intends on throwing many more punches, it could prove to be the Kryptonite to bring superman Canelo down to earth.
What Golovkin needs to work on is catching Canelo when he’s on the attack, as he’s expected to try and apply more pressure in the rematch to duplicate the success he had in rounds 10, 11 and 12 from last September.
Canelo faded badly after the first quarter of the fight from the pressure that GGG was putting on him. Golovkin ended up outworking Canelo and seemingly running away with the fight from the 3rd round on. The judges still scored it a 12 round draw, but GGG looked like he had done more than enough to win.
Golovkin’s trainer Abel Sanchez has done a good job of retooling his game for him to defeat the Mexican star Canelo. Throwing lots of power punches with speed is a must for GGG if he wants to beat Canelo in the second fight, because he might come up empty in the rematch if all he’s willing to do is jab the red-haired star from afar like he did last time.
“This fight is something different,” Golden Boy Promotion CEO Oscar De La Hoya said. ”This fight is personal. I’ve never seen Canelo so angry. He really wants to knock Golovkin out. As a promoter, I want to see him knock Golovkin out,” De La Hoya said.
GGG is angry at Canelo for testing positive for clenbuterol twice, and he’s equally unhappy with the way his fight was scored last September against the Golden Boy star. Golovkin wants to smash Canelo to bits to remove any chances of the judges taking the fight away from him a second time. Golovkin’s problem is he’s the B-side opponent fighting on a Golden Boy promoted card at Canelo’s preferred venue of Las Vegas. All those things work against GGG winning a decision if it goes to the scorecards again, which is why he intends on making spectators out of the judges Dave Moretti, Glenn Feldman and Steve Weisfield. Canelo’s positive tests for clenbuterol seem to be the thing that has GGG the angriest. Although Canelo blames the positive tests on tainted meat that he says he ate in Mexico, Golovkin doesn’t buy that excuse. He thinks Canelo took the substance to try and gain an advantage over him, and he’s not sure whether he used it in the first fight with him.
“This fight is personal because of all that’s been said, and it will be difficult to regain the respect that we once had,” Canelo said. ”The statements that have been made about me have given me more motivation to train harder.”
It would be well if Canelo tried to forget about the trash talking that’s been done by Team GGG, and instead focus on just fighting smart. Canelo is kidding himself if he thinks he’s going to defeat Golovkin by fighting his fight by getting in the trenches and slugging it out with him. If Canelo fights like that against GGG, he could be sorry for it later. Canelo is better off trying to win the fight by using his intelligence in the same way that he did in the first fight. The guys that have given Golovkin problems have been fighters that were smart, and chose to fight him in spurts. We saw that from Canelo, Kell Brook and Daniel Jacobs. None of those fighters were willing to stand and battle GGG.
”I have watched the first fight several times. The error that I made was that I had opportunities to counter that I needed to have taken advantage of,” Canelo said about his first fight against GGG. ”I need to do that in the rematch.”
Canelo is going to be running into Golovkin’s jab all night long if he tries to attack a little too much. Golovkin showed in the previous fight that he could spear Canelo with his jab and stop his forward momentum when he would attempt to attack him. Canelo would sometimes continue to attack. When he would do that, Golovkin backed up and nailed him with more jabs until he realized that he needed to stop attacking. Having the longer reach and an excellent jab makes GGG hard to get to.
The problem that Canelo had is he didn’t have enough energy to go after Golovkin to counter him. It obviously looks easy for Canelo in looking at the replay of the fight, but the fact of the matter is he didn’t have the energy to fight hard. Canelo had put on so much muscle in the four weeks leading up to the fight that he couldn’t muster the energy to do anything other than to fight in spurts at the start of the rounds. If Canelo wants to learn anything, he needs to understand that he can’t tinker with his physique in a training camp before his biggest fight of his career. If Canelo had just left well enough alone by fighting GGG with his normal size, muscles and weight, he might have won the fight. Packing on a massive amount of muscle weight in the training camp before the GGG fight ruined Canelo’s only chance of winning the fight. Canelo is going about the rematch with GGG in a smarter way by getting his size back down to where it always was. He still looks bigger than what he used to weigh, but he should be okay if he comes into the fight in the low 170s rather than the 180s.
