By Sean Jones: Shane Mosley doesn’t like Saul Canelo Alvarez’s chances of beating Gennady Golovkin in their rematch this month, as the Kazakhstan fighter is bigger, stronger and more determined this time to beat him. Mosley says that Golovkin (38-0-1, 34 KOs) knows he can take Canelo’s punching power now after fighting him last year, so he expects him to go after him in a more concerted manner in their rematch on September 15 on HBO pay-per-view at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Mosley predicts that the 36-year-old Golovkin will be coming after Canelo in the rematch, and he won’t be coming after him in a halfhearted manner like he did last time he fought the Golden Boy Promotions star on September 16 last year in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The judges scored the first Canelo-Golovkin fight a 12 round draw, much to the displeasure of the boxing public. They saw GGG winning it. Even Canelo’s own fans thought Golovkin should have had his hand raised at the end of the fight, but there was nothing they could do about it. The outcome turned out to be off putting for a lot of casual fans, who saw the popular Mexican star Canelo being given preferential treatment by the Las Vegas judges.
“He has to do everything right to be able to outbox and beat Triple-G, because he is coming and he’s serious,” Mosley said to Lance Pugmire of the latimes.com. ”Triple-G might know he can take Canelo’s best punch. That’s why Triple-G has to jump on him. I think Canelo can break down.”
In looking at the previous fight, it’s clear that if Golovkin had jumped on Canelo early and let his hands go with nonstop shots, he would have broken him down and stopped him early in the contest. If you take a close look a he final 20 seconds of the 12th round, Golovkin had Canelo wobbling like a top after he went after him with a flurry of heavy shots. Canelo was still firing back to the very end of the fight, but he had lost power on his punches and he badly fatigued from being forced to fight hard in that round. If Golovkin duplicates that type of effort for the entire fight, Canelo likely won’t last more than 2 or 3 rounds.
📺 ESPN's new SportsCenter ad features Oscar De La Hoya, Canelo Alvarez and Gennady Golovkin. pic.twitter.com/0DEo2MPd5h
— Michael Benson (@MichaelBensonn) August 31, 2018
Canelo will likely try and run though. He may be coming into the fight with the game plan of attacking Golovkin in the pocket this time, but that plan will almost surely be quickly abandoned when things start looking bleak for the 28-year-old Mexican native. Canelo (49-1-2, 34 KOs) isn’t going to walk the plank and let himself be ripped apart by the shark-like Golovkin in the early going when it becomes clear to him and his two trainers Chepo and Eddy Reynoso that he doesn’t have the size, power, chin or the stamina to fight a grueling war with the naturally bigger and stronger GGG. Canelo doesn’t have the key ingredients to fight Golovkin in the way that he needs to for him to win this fight, which is why he’s going to throw his game plan overboard in the earliest moments of the fight against Golovkin when things become clear that it’s a losing proposition for him to slug with the Kazakhstan fighter.
“He might have some more age, but it’s a hard fight for Canelo because GGG is too big and strong,” Mosley said.
Mosley obviously saw the previous Canelo-GGG fight and noticed how much bigger Golovkin was than Canelo. The strength of Golovkin was evident when he was landing his shots. His punches looked a lot harder than Canelo’s shots. What hurt Golovkin from doing enough to win the fight in the eyes of two of the three judges was the way that he waited so long before throwing his punches. Like in his fights with Kell Brook and Daniel Jacobs, Golovkin waited until he was certain that he could land before he would fire off a punch. Golovkin would have been better off to throw his shots continuously to force Canelo’s
hand of trying to counter him. When Golovkin finally did go after Canelo in an all-out manner in the 12th round, he discovered that he was able to land shots
In looking at the new ESPN Sports Center add that shows Canelo and Golovkin facing off with each, GGG looks considerably bigger. The video footage of this face off appears to have been taken a month ago before the two of them had gotten started with their serious training. Golovkin looked a little thick still at the time, and not in the trim shape he currently is in. Now that Canelo has taken a lot of muscle weight off, he’s looking very small compared to Golovkin. Canelo is taking muscle weight off with the idea of improving his stamina and speed for the rematch. Canelo’s main flaw in his fight last September was Canelo’s inability to fight hard for the entire rounds. He was gassing out at the start of each round from the least amount of effort put in on his part.
“I believe he’ll walk Canelo down and have his way with him if he turns it on earlier,” Mosley said. A KO win is “a possibility in the later rounds if he [GGG] applies pressure early and makes Canelo work every bit of the rounds,” Mosley said. ”It’s hard for Canelo to fight the whole fight. He fights when he wants to.”
Mosley hits it on the head in saying that Canelo “fights when he wants to.” I would go one step farther by saying that Canelo fights hard when he has the stamina to. When he tires out after exerting himself, he stops fighting and backs up to the ropes or he flees to his left to escape the pressure. When Canelo is exhausted, he’s only looking to land desperate left counters and uppercuts. But when Canelo is REALLY tired, then his shots become more of the slapping variety with little power on them. Canelo can no longer put together enough power on his shots for him to hurt his opponents when he’s exhausted. Last time, Golovkin was too concerned with not getting hit and being made to look bad in the eyes of the fans at ringside at the T-Mobile Arena. By holding off, Golovkin was allowing Canelo to stick around and fight at the slow pace that he needed to for him to have a chance of muddying the water by making the fight close.
“What I make of it is that, you know, his trainer [Abel Sanchez] doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Canelo’s promoter Oscar De La Hoya of Golden Boy Promotions said to Fighthub. ”His trainer doesn’t know how to change it up because he doesn’t know how to train any other way but one style, which is very limited. I strongly think that Canelo has the huge advantage here.”
Golovkin’s trainer Abel Sanchez already did have him changing things up in the first fight with Canelo by having GGG stand on the outside and using his jab for most of the fight. It worked well for Golovkin with him being able to control the fight from the outside against the shorter-armed Canelo. However, the judges weren’t impressed with Golovkin’s outside work. The judges, at least two of them, liked Canelo’s hard counters. Canelo was landing two to three good counter shots in each round.
Golovkin was outworking Canelo by a huge margin in hitting him with head-snapping jabs, but two of them judges seemed to be more enthralled with Canelo’s cleaner-landing shots, even though they were far fewer in number than the many punches that GGG was landing. The judges weren’t giving Golovkin credit for the constant pressure and the work he was doing. While Canelo was against the ropes resting through two-thirds of each round, Golovkin was busy attacking, throwing punches and applying nonstop pressure. It was easy to see which of the two fighters was doing the vast majority of the work in the rounds. The judge [Don Trella] that scored the fight 114-114, gave Canelo the 7th round. That was a round that the other two judges gave to Golovkin, as it was a clear situation where GGG had battered Canelo entire three minutes. It’s unclear what Trella had seen in 7th round to make him want to give it to Canelo. It was such a one-sided round in Golovkin’s favor, the only thing you could think is that Trella might have gotten mixed up when scoring the round and given it to Canelo by mistake. Whatever the case, Trella’s decision to give Canelo the 7th round cost Golovkin the victory, because if he had given the round to GGG like the other two judges had, then the Kazakhstan fighter would have won the fight by a 12 round split decision. There’s nothing GGG could do about the judge Adalaide Byrd, who scored the fight to Canelo by a 10 rounds to 2 score. Golovkin was never going to win the fight in the eyes of that judge, who scored it 118-110.
Mosley isn’t sure what to think of Canelo’s two positive tests for clenbuterol last February. Mosley thinks that Canelo did eat tainted beef to test positive for banned substance clenbuterol. What is clear though is that Canelo cannot use the same tainted beef excuse again and come across as believable. Getting caught twice using a performance enhancing substance like clenbuterol is bad enough, but if Canelo tests positive a third time for his September 15 rematch against GGG, no amount of tainted beef excuses is going to convince the boxing public that it was an accidental thing. Canelo will look guilty in the eyes of the fans. If this is a situation where Canelo ate tainted beef last February to test positive for clenbuterol, then it’s important that he and his trainers monitor his food better to make sure this doesn’t happen a third time. Canelo has been training in San Diego, California, which should in theory reduce the chances of him eating contaminated beef, as the U.S beef producers don’t add clenbuterol to the feed for their cattle.
Canelo has plenty of motivation to show the boxing public that he’s not a dirty fighter that many of them think he is, and that he’s superior to Golovkin in terms of skills. Canelo and GGG are being drug tested continuously during training camp, and they’ll continue to be tested until after their fight on September 15. Canelo wants to show the world that he’s the better fighter than Golovkin, and the way he can do that is to beat him soundly in the rematch and test negative for performance enhancing drugs afterwards. Canelo can’t come up positive again, because a third positive test will erase whatever good he does in his rematch with Triple this month.
”I think Canelo is going to take advantage of it and, you know, that’s why rematches are so important,” De La Hoya said about his belief that Golovkin isn’t a well-trained fighter. ”That’s why rematches are so beautiful to watch, because you can see who the superior fighter is in the second time around, and I strongly feel that Canelo is a much more superior fighter.”
Canelo didn’t show himself to be the superior fighter in the first fight with Golovkin, but perhaps he might be able to raise his game a couple of notches so that he can realize De La Hoya’s vision that he has for him. Canelo looked like he wasn’t trained well by his two chunky trainers. Golovkin was the fighter with the better conditioning of the two, which suggests that Canelo’s trainers, Eddy & Chepo Reynoso, dropped the ball by focusing too much on his defense and not enough on his cardiovascular system. That’s a failure on their part. It might have been wiser for Canelo to get a big broom and sweep out his training camp of his old trainers and start from scratch with new blood that could help him train and fix the flaws in his game. The Reynosos have been unable to improve Canelo’s poor stamina during his 15-year pro career, and that should be reason enough for him to dump them both in favor of new trainers.