Canelo’s manager says an old monkey can’t learn new stuff

Boxingnews24.com

By Sean Jones

Saul ‘Canelo’ Alvarez’s trainer Jose ‘Chepo’ Reynoso says Gennady ‘GGG’ Golovkin can’t improve from what he did last time and he fought Canelo in September. Chepo says ‘old monkey can’t learn new stuff’ and he sees him being beaten in the rematch on May 5th.

The venue for the second fight is expected to be announced in a week or 2, and it’s likely the two fighters will be back in Las Vegas, Nevada, which is where they fought each other last time.
Chepo maintains that Canelo hurt Golovkin in the fight. He doesn’t say when Golovkin was hurt, but he thinks he was hurt all the same.

”The knockout is possible, because Canelo is already adapted to his style. Saul hurt Golovkin and we never saw Golovkin hurt Canelo,” Chepo said to us.as.com. ”’ Saul said the other day that he was going to knock out Golovkin so there is no doubt about anything, not even with the judges.”

Golovkin is going to fight harder this time, and it’s going to be bad for Canelo if he tries to use the same tactics as last time. Running won’t work for Canelo in the rematch.

Canelo looked like he was ready to fall over from exhaustion last September from the pace that Golovkin was setting. The only rounds where Canelo looked halfway decent was in 1, 2 and 12. Canelo was tired out in the other rounds, and only willing to put out effort in the first minute. Canelo looked like he was half stepping it. Canelo showed no stamina at all in that fight. For Canelo to try and improve his stamina this late in his career, it’s not realistic. Canelo needs to understand what he is. He’s just a short burst fighter, who can only fight for brief periods of time. If Canelo is lucky, he’ll have judges that score fights based on the activity he shows in the start of the rounds, and ignore the other two-thirds of the rounds like the judges did last time for the Canelo-GGG fight in September.

Canelo is trying to improve his cardio, but it’s going to be impossible for him to make any real headway in that department. It’s not only Canelo’s cardio problems that led to him gassing out against GGG last time, it’s also the pace that was set in the fight. Golovkin was really pressing Canelo, and that helped contribute to him gassing out fast. Canelo isn’t used to be pressured in his fights because he’s always been the bigger and/or more talented fighter.

Against Golovkin, Canelo was the bigger guy, but he wasn’t the stronger guy and he wasn’t capable of fighting as hard as Golovkin. It’s not going to change in the rematch. Canelo is a fighter that wasn’t meant to compete at a fast pace. He’s a guy that absolutely needs to fight at a slow pace for him to do well. Canelo could get away with that with the mismatches that Golden Boy Promotions has setup for him against guys like Alfredo Angulo, Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., James Kirkland, Josesito Lopez and Amir Khan. But each time Canelo has been matched against good fighters like GGG, Floyd Mayweather Jr., Austin Trout and Erislandy Lara, he’s struggled and appeared to lose. I think Canelo lost to Trout, Lara and GGG. Of course, Canelo lost to Mayweather, even though one judge unbelievably scored the fight a draw. Canelo has been involved in controversial decisions since 2013.

With Canelo’s stamina issues, it sounds like a pipe dream on Chepo’s part in talking up a knockout for the red-headed star. The pace that Golovkin set last time had Canelo looking red in the face and badly fatigued. The thing is that wasn’t even Golovkin fighting at the fastest pace possible. Golovkin was mostly boxing Canelo during the fight until he scrapped that idea and went after him starting in the 10th. By that point, Canelo appeared to be trailing badly due to him gassing out after round 2. Unless his trainer Abel Sanchez comes up with another crazy idea of Golovkin starting out slowly again like he did last September, this time GGG is going to press Canelo at a much faster pace, because he knows that he can’t handle fighting at even a moderately fast pace.

The stamina is not there for Canelo, and never will be. Chepo can talk about Canelo having fixed his stamina issues, but that’s not going to happen. If Canelo hasn’t developed stamina by the age of 27, he’s never going to have good conditioning. I’m not surprised though. I come from a track background. I was a sprinter, and guys like Canelo never had good stamina for running. Canelo is built like a shot putter. Those guys could never run even a lap around the track without turning red in the face and being too tired to run at more than a trot. Canelo is basically a shot putter type of fighter. You don’t fix stamina for guys like that. You just hope they can find a way to get their rest breaks so they don’t fall apart. Canelo was resting most of the fight Golovkin. The only reason Canelo didn’t lose was because of the controversial scoring by 2 of the judges. If Canelo doesn’t realize that he failed and deserved a loss, then that’s sad. The fact that Canelo is trying to improve his stamina tells me that he knows he lost to Golovkin.

”But I insist, Golovkin has already reached his top and as they say in my ranch, ‘Old Chango [monkey] does not learn new stuff,’ so I think that Golovkin is not going to surprise Canelo,” Cheopo said. ”We will be the ones who will surprise him.”

Golovkin doesn’t need to learn any new tricks for him to beat Canelo in the rematch. Golovkin just needs to increase the pressure that he puts on Canelo, start faster this time, and he needs to throw more punches from a closer range.

Keys to Golovkin beating Canelo in rematch

• Throw 60 to 80 punches per round

• Stay closer to Canelo. Don’t stay on the outside jabbing all night, as this will enable Canelo to run away along the ropes like he did last time

• Start faster. Golovkin can’t give away the first 2 rounds to Canelo like he did last September. If that was Abel Sanchez’s plan for Golovkin last time, then he needs to tell him that it’s a dumb idea. Sanchez has cruiserweight Murat Gassiev use the same strategy for his recent fight against Yunier Dorticos, and he immediately fell behind in the fight. It was a dumb strategy when Golovkin used that against Canelo last September, and it was just silly for Gassiev to follow the same plan for his fight with Dorticos. Sanchez needs to realize that when his fighters are competing against the best, it’s not a good idea to give away rounds at the beginning of fights. All that does is put them behind the eight ball. Once judges start giving rounds away to one fighter, they just keep going even though the fight has changed hands. They seemingly keep going in the original direction in how the fight started out. It’s like having the throttle stuck on a car. I think with some judges, once they see one fighter winning at the start, they rubber stamp rounds for that same fighter without being observant that the fight has changed hands. That’s the only real explanation I can think of for judges that worked the Canelo-GGG fight last September continuing to give Canelo rounds after the 2nd, because GGG had completely taken over the fight after round 2. Caenelo was gassed out and useless inside the ring.

• Don’t let Canelo run along the ropes. Stay close

• Be ready for Canelo to try excessive holding. This the only Canelo didn’t use last September, so it makes sense for him to try that tactic against Golovkin. If Canelo knows he can’t run along the ropes like last time, he’ll likely try and hold GGG and wrestle him to tire him out. If nothing else, Canelo will hold to keep Golovkin from throwing punches and embarrassing him by knocking him out. Holding will the last ditch effort by Canelo to keep from getting knocked out in the rematch

• Don’t try and box Canelo. It would be a blunder on Golovkin’s part to try and out-box Canelo. I would hope that Sanchez doesn’t try and turn Golovkin into Floyd Mayweather Jr. and have him go there looking to beat Canelo by boxing him. If Sanchez tries to change Golovkin’s fighting DNA by instructing him to fight in a style that is not suited to how he’s fought his entire career, he’s going to struggle. The whole reason Golovkin had problems with Canelo and Danny Jacobs is because he tried to box them from the outside. If that was Golovkin’s idea for him to fight like that, then Sanchez should have shook some sense into him in between rounds to wake him up and let him know that he was making a mistake. The fact that Sanchez didn’t tell Golovkin to stop boxing Canelo and Jacobs means that it was his brainchild for him to box those 2 fighters. It was dumb of Sanchez to do that. Golovkin snapped out of it by himself late in both of those fights, but it still too late to impress the judges that had giving Jacobs and Canelo round after round even though the fight had changed with Golovkin taking over. Like I said, some judges once they start scoring rounds for one fighter, they continue to give rounds to that guy even when the fight has changed directions. There’s a lot of poor judges in boxing, and we saw that last September.

”Saul in every fight shows progress,” Reynoso said. ”We are sure that Golovkin is the same fighter always. He has reached his limit, but Saul is a thinking fighter. Saul causes problems in the ring and I’m sure it will cause problems for Golovkin,” Reynoso said.

Reynoso needs to expect a different Golovkin that fought Canelo last time, because he’s going to bring a lot more pressure in the rematch. Golovkin isn’t likely going to try and box the highly popular Mexican star. Golovkin found that you don’t beat Canelo by a decision, so he’s probably going to try and wear him down and knock him out with his old style. Canelo can try to run again or maybe hold all night long, but I don’t think that’s going to work.

Golovkin did fight differently against Canelo compared to in most of his previous fights. Chepo fails to point out that Golovkin was fighting on the outside jabbing most of the fight. That approach from Triple G was different from how he fought most of his career. The only fights in Golovkin’s career in which he’s boxed from the outside was his matches against Jacobs, David Lemieux and Canelo. Golovkin beat Jacobs and Lemieux by jabbing them. Golovkin clearly beat Canelo with his jabbing from the outside, but the judges scored it a controversial draw. If Golovkin could count on the judges scoring the fight correctly, he could just stick with what he did in the first fight and he’d win a comfortable decision. It’s like if Floyd Mayweather Jr. fought Canelo with the same judges as Golovkin did, he would have been stuck with a draw as well, and he’d be stuck having to try and slug with him in the rematch for him to get a victory. Since Golovkin can’t count on the judges to score the fight in a normal way, he has to increase the pressure and make Canelo boil over on the side of the road like an old car.

I disagree with Chepo that Canelo shows improvement in every fight. I’ve seen improvement in his stamina department, and I wasn’t impressed with Canelo’s fights against Liam Smith, Golovkin, Lara and Miguel Cotto. I didn’t see improvement in those fights. Canelo looked tired against Kirkland, Cotto and GGG. Canelo hasn’t improved at all. They say that Canelo learned from the Mayweather fight by using some slick boxing moves in his subsequent fights. Canelo was doing the Mayweather stuff even before he fought him. If you go back and look at Canelo’s fight with Austin Trout in April 2013, he was fighting against the ropes after he got hurt by Trout. The last half of the fight, Canelo was fighting against the ropes using the shoulder roll defense. Canelo got totally outworked and appeared to lose the fight. The judges gave Canelo the win, but he didn’t deserve it because he was tired, fighting on the ropes and getting outworked by Trout the entire second half of the fight. I gave Trout 4 out of the first 6 rounds, and 5 out of the last 6. I had Trout winning a comfortable decision over Canelo.

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