By Dan Ambrose: With five days to go before their rematch on Saturday, Gennady Golovkin remains the favorite to defeat Saul Canelo Alvarez in their fight on HBO PPV at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. Golovkin (38-0-1 34 KOs) is favored to beat the 28-year-old Canelo by the line -155 to +125.
The Golden Boy Promotions star Canelo hasn’t been able to budge the odds-maker’s belief that he simply isn’t good enough to unseat IBO/WBA/WBC middleweight champion no matter how much success he had in their previous fight on September 16 last year in Las Vegas. Canelo’s two positive tests for clenbuterol and his loss of muscle size have a lot of doubters whether he can do the job against the 36-year-old Golovkin.
A lot of boxing fans doubt whether Canelo can do as well as he did last time against GGG due to his loss of size. Without Canelo’s huge muscles that he was sporting in the first fight with Golovkin, he’s going to need to try and find another way to beat him. Unfortunately for Canelo, the element of surprise is gone in terms of him being able to confuse Golovkin by running to his left all night and hanging on the ropes.
If Canelo resorts to using those two tired strategies for the rematch, he could wind up getting worked over and stopped. Golovkin will have trained hard cut off the ring on Canelo if he elects to move to his left or right. Likewise, if Canelo backs up against the ropes and tries to fight Golovkin from that vantage point, he’s going to get worked over by him. Canelo must come up with a different plan to try and beat GGG because the two main strategies that he worked in the first fight won’t be as effective this time around. The best thing that Canelo can do is to try and fight him.
Golden Boy Promotions boss Oscar De La Hoya has been saying that Canelo is going to take the fight to Golovkin and look to go to war against him. De La Hoya’s opinion that Canelo can beat GGG by pressuring him is the occasional intervals of success that he had against the Kazakhstan fighter in rounds 10, 11 and 12 in their fight last September. Canelo was successful at times when he took the fight o
In other fights on the card, WBO junior middleweight champion Jaime Munguia (30-0, 25 KOs) is a huge favorite to beat Brandon Cook (20-1, 13 KOs) in a voluntary defense. The 21-year-old Munguia is a lot younger than the 32-year-old Canadian Cook, but he’s the much harder puncher of the two and that’s what the bettors are looking in picking him to beat the Canadian. Cook was beaten just three fights ago by Kanat Islam by a 9th round knockout in 2017. Cook has won his last two fights against Miguel Angel Suarez and Hector Carlos Santana. Those are second tier fighters and not considered class fighters. Former IBF middleweight champion David Lemieux (39-4, 33 KOs) is the favorite to defeat Gary ‘Spike’ O’Sullivan (28-2, 20 KOs). It doesn’t matter which of the two win the fight. One of them is going to likely wind up facing Canelo in December unless Golden Boy wants to speedily put together a third fight between Alvarez and GGG. That’s always a possibility because if Canelo gets whipped by GGG this Saturday, he’s going to want to avenge the loss in the worst way.