Cotto will beat Canelo due to experience, says former champion

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    Miguel CottoAs a former British light-middleweight champion, current trainer and a pundit for boxing on Sky Sports, Jamie Moore is better qualified than most to give a prediction for the as-yet unconfirmed meeting between WBC World middleweight champion Miguel Cott o(40-4, 33 KO’s) and the young Mexican megastar Saul ‘Canelo’ Alvarez (45-1-1, 32 KO’s).

    Both men steamrolled their last opponents; Cotto with a fourth-round TKO over Australian veteran Daniel Geale (at a catchweight of 157 lbs). in June, and Alvarez via a third-round decapitation over the rugged, but surprisingly overmatched James Kirkland one month before.

    Since Cotto had his glove raised three weeks ago, almost all the talk has been about him and Alvarez finally getting it on -WBA Super middleweight champ Gennady Golovkin is slated ravage the scraps that are left over- and whilst no date or venue has been set, Moore cast his mind ahead with Sky Sports and gave his thoughts on how this one might go.

    “I’m a massive fan of Cotto. I always have been ever since he won his world title. I love his style, and I love his left hook – I really think it’s a thing of beauty.”

    “When you look back and see what Cotto has achieved over the last 10 or 15 years, it’s really incredible and for him to still be around and at the very top is something else.”

    “Alvarez has had a lot of fights, but he turned professional at just 15 and a lot of those early wins were just to pad his record. He’s an absolute icon in Mexico and a terrific fighter in his own right.”

    “I just personally feel that Cotto has more experience at a higher level and will go into the fight with great confidence. He’ll be flying because he beat the linear middleweight champion having moved up from light-middleweight. I think size-wise, these two match up evenly, but I think Cotto just has the experience to nick it.”

    The only glaring advantage Alvarez holds over Cotto is that he has fewer miles on the clock. As Moore alluded to, Alvarez only began taking on risky opposition in 2010 when he made the march for his first WBC title at 154 lbs.

    His last five have been tough asks though, most notably against Floyd Mayweather, Austin Trout and Erislandy Lara, only the first of which he lost.

    Alvarez as proven himself as a young man who belongs at the highest level over the past two years, but Cotto did it a decade ago in the light-welterweight/welterweight divisions. Future and past world champions like Randall Bailey, Ricardo Torres, Paulie Malignaggi, Zab Judah, and Shane Mosley all took losses to Cotto before the turn of the decade.
    Fighters like these do not go easily, and plenty of blood was spilt.

    There is also the maligned incident against Antonio Margarito in which Cotto suffered his first pro defeat. The Puerto-Rican took an almighty beating from an unstoppable Mexican tidal wave at the MGM Grand in 2008 en-route to an eleventh-round TKO loss.

    In his next fight Margarito’s gloves were found to be reinforced with ‘Plaster of Paris’, a formula that solidifies around gauze to create what essentially becomes a caste when it dries out.

    This obviously opened the door for speculation that the same disgusting trick had been pulled against Cotto, and there are photos of discoloration in Margarito’s gloves following the Cotto victory, which has led many to believe that Margarito has been cheating for much longer.

    Cotto has had eleven fights since then and has emerged from more than a few with a swollen, bruised and bloody face. The man is thirty-four years old with a long, gruelling career behind him; something has to give at some point, and it may just against Alvarez.

    The 24-year-old from Jalisco is looking increasingly powerful when he lets his combinations go as he creeps into the middleweight division.

    The demolition jobs he did on Kirkland and Alfredo Angulo speak volumes for the kind of damage he can do when he finds the target. The question is whether Cotto, under the guidance of Freddie Roach, will have the subtle guile to befuddle the younger, less experienced fighter.