Golovkin will dominate Canelo late says Sanchez

Boxingnews24.com

By Jeff Aranow: Going by what trainer Abel Sanchez is saying, Saul “Canelo Alvarez won’t be able to stand up to the fire power and extreme pressure Gennady “GGG’ Golovkin will be putting on him during their fight on September 16. This is how Sanchez sees the fight ending up. Unlike the fawning of some boxing fans about Canelo’s defensive skills, Sanchez sees defensive flaws in Canelo’s game that will make him easy to hit by Triple G and easy prey on September 16.

Sanchez could be right. Canelo does get hit when he faces quality fighters, which he hasn’t done in quite some time. Sanchez seems to be a lot more confident in Golovkin’s ability to fight in his normal attacking style for the Canelo fight than he did in his last contest against the bigger Danny Jacobs, who came into the Triple G fight with a big weight advantage.

Sanchez believes it’ll be a much easier fight for Golovkin to prepare for because they won’t need to get super middleweights and light heavyweights for him to spar like they had to for the Jacobs fight. Jacobs is for all intents and purposes a super middleweight who boils down to fight at 160 to get a size advantage over his opponents.

Canelo has been taking a long break from fighting good opposition that was a threat to beat him. You can say that Canelo has taken 3-year break since last good opponent Erislandy Lara.

Golovkin needs to be in a war for him to do well in his fights. We saw that in GGG’s last fight against former WBA World middleweight champion on March 18. Golovkin changed his entire style of fighting by going from a knockout artist to a pure boxer, and it didn’t work for him. Golovkin barely won the fight, and gave the fragile-chinned Jacobs confidence to try and rally in the later rounds. It was a bad plan for the wrong opponent. It’s good that Golovkin isn’t going to back to that strategy because it would get him in hot water against Canelo if he tried to out-box him.

Canelo wants to box because it would let him use his hand speed advantage to win rounds. If the rounds are close, it won’t play in Golovkin’s favor. It’ll work for Canelo. He’ll have most of the fans that will be rooting for him. Golden Boy Promotions is going to stage the Canelo-Golovkin fight in one of three states – California, Nevada or Texas – that will favor Canelo. Having the fight on the East Coast would favor Golovkin in terms of the boxing fans that purchase tickets to see the fight live. Canelo-Golovkin clearly isn’t going to end up in New York.

“Saul has got very fast hands, throws nice combinations and he is a come-forward kind of guy, so we’re going to have two come-forward guys with real good hand speed,” said Sanchez to skysports.com. Neither guy has got the Floyd Mayweather defence, so they are going to hit each other and it’s going to be a great fight.”

What we don’t know is how well Canelo can exist in a back and forth war against a puncher like Golovkin. We haven’t seen Canelo face any real punchers during his entire pro career. Golovkin has fought 3 huge punchers in Jacobs, Curtis Stevens and David Lemieux. The biggest punchers Canelo has fought in his 12-year pro career are Miguel Cotto, Liam Smith, Carlos Baldomir, Kermit Cintron, Shane Mosley, James Kirkland and Alfredo Angulo. Those guys are not in the same league in terms of power compared to the fighter that Golovkin has faced during his career. This is why there are a lot of unknowns with Canelo as far as what will happen when he starts getting hit cleanly by Golovkin.

We saw Cotto bounce his best shots off the head of Canelo without it hurting him, but Cotto is a tiny 5’7” fighter, who weighed just a little over 160 pounds on the night of his fight with Canelo in 2015. Cotto didn’t throw body shots, which is the one area where we’ve seen Canelo hurt in the past. Cotto was head hunting the entire fight, and that was never going to work against Canelo. It was the wrong approach to use, given Canelo’s history of being able to take head shots from bigger punchers.

“I see Golovkin winning going away, but if Golovkin is able to tag him in the second part of the fight – he may stop him late,” said Sanchez.

If Golovkin takes the fight to Canelo, he will tag him with something. There’s no question that Golovkin will land. Canelo doesn’t move well enough to avoid Golovkin for long. The two fighters are going to lock horns and trade. If Canelo handle the pressure, he’s going to break and get knocked out. Golovkin needs to be a little more decisive than he was in the Jacobs fight.

Golovkin was waiting too long between throwing power shots. Triple G would jab and try and pick off Jacobs’ shots. Golovkin did a good job of doing that. However, the judges still gave Jacobs many of the rounds in the second half of the fight anyway despite his punches being blocked. The judges were impressed by Jacobs just being busy rather than on scoring the fight based on punches landing.

“Two guys who will stand and use their skills and, yes, they are going to hit each other, because that is boxing, and the guy who has the most grit and the most determination is going to win the fight,” said Sanchez.

Hopefully this is a good fight. Golovkin’s fight against Jacobs was not a great one, and that’s not just because it was close. Golovkin wasn’t putting it on the line in letting his hands go with power shots, and neither was Jacobs. We saw a very cautious Jacobs in the first 6 rounds of the fight. By the time Jacobs did go on the attack, he was 6 rounds down and has already lost the fight based on the knockdown in the 4th round. The scoring by the judges in the second half of the fight was very poor. They gave Jacobs the 10th and 12th rounds, which he clearly had lost.

Golovkin has Jacobs hurt in the 10th, and he outworked him in the 12th. What that fight showed is that when one fighter lets another one back in the fight, even briefly, you get judges that continue to give rounds to that are coming back. If Golovkin needs to make sure that he finishes Canelo if he gets the jump on him in the first part of the fight, because if he lets him back in the fight in the second half, we could see the same kind of avalanche scoring that we saw in the Jacobs fight. Hopefully there will be better judges working the Canelo-Golovkin fight, because we don’t need to have a controversial decision.