By Brian Webber: Gennadiy Golovkin (42-2-1, 37 KOs) says he made a “tactical mistake” by waiting too long to get his offense started against Canelo Alvarez (58-2-2, 39 KOs) last Saturday night at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.
Golovkin didn’t start fighting with any kind of aggression until the eighth round, and by that time, Canelo appeared to be well ahead.
Ideally, the adjustments from the 40-year-old Golovkin should have been made as early as the third or fourth round.
It’s unclear why it took Golovkin so long to get his offense ramped up because it was obvious that he was giving the fight away to the former four-division world champion Canelo.
There’s no word whether Golovkin’s trainer Johnathon Banks asked him to begin taking the fight to Canelo much earlier than the eighth, considering he had to know that they needed to make adjustments from the original game plan earlier.
“Probably, it was a tactical mistake on my part to start slow. On the other hand, I wanted to see how the fight was going. I believe we both started slowly,” said Golovkin after the fight.
It shouldn’t have taken an experienced fighter like Golovkin until the eighth round to “see how the fight was going.” That doesn’t make sense.
It just looked like Golovkin was too timid to attack, knowing that he’d get countered by Canelo and it would involve risk.
Additionally, I think Golovkin looked very old & slow and unable to pull the trigger on his shots, even when the openings where there.
Instead of letting his hands go in the way he needed to win, Golovkin would wait and wait before finally throwing a single shot. There was too much waiting on Golovkin’s part between punches, and it was the wrong way to fight Canelo.
“We did some reconnaissance, and that reconnaissance probably went too long for me,” said Golovkin. “It’s not up to me to talk about scoring. The judges came up with those scores. That’s their decision.
“The strategy was to win the fight. We should probably not attribute my loss to strategy because I felt great. Those minor shots that were successful from Canelo did not surprise me. I was not that successful with my shots. Ultimately the judges scored it in his favor.
“I did not feel any animosity with our rivalry. He was the one that said it was personal. My response to that is, why would he waited so many years for this fight to happen?” said Golovkin.
