This should be the real fight of the year. Canelo has Mayweathered for the last year or so but now its on. I’m predicting GGG in 8.
One year ago I’d say Golovkin was the hands down favorite. Canelo has been delaying this all this time to get a better look at him and let him age. As of now I think Golovkin only has a slight edge over Canelo in general, and if Canelo does his homework and has a good night he could take advantage of Golovkin’s weaknesses. Still, I see it going at least 10 rounds, probably GGG winning by knock out, possibly Canelo winning a split decision if it goes the distance (I haven’t seen who the judges are yet, so not real sure what would happen in a decision).
I’m going with Canelo.
Yes, it’s true, he’s been following a deeply conservative career path, starving himself to remain in the light middleweight category, doing lots of catchweight fights… This will be his first official middleweight fight, and it will be against a real champion. And when he fought Mayweather he fell for Money’s tricks easily and wasn’t even close to win. I get that GGG could easily prove that he’s all hype. All that’s true. Hell, I love GGG myself.
But I’ve also watched him in some serious fights, like the one against Cotto, and he’s the real deal, not just good on paper.
Any takers for the theory that GGG might have soft-pedalled it a bit against Jacobs to make this fight? Seems improbable (as Jacobs is pretty good), but certainly seemed the catalyst to finally get Canelo to step up.
Agree with the OP that GGG stops him mid to late. If it does go the distance then I’d expect it must be Canelo’s fight - not because of any edge he might have with the judges, more that to take it twelve would indicate he’d slightly gotten the upper hand and dictated play.
I have considered that. Perhaps not intentional but he may not have been ‘up’ for that fight considering it not much of a challenge. I’m sure we’ll see the best Golovkin he can be against Canelo. But we’ll also see the best Canelo he can be.
GGG getting a close decision over a very good Jacobs and Canelo beating up the corpse of Chavez Jr makes the fight seem more competitive than it is. I think Canelo is a good fighter and will box well until he gets in trouble and finds himself stopped around the 6th. It might look similar to Canelo vs Khan, only this time Canelo is the guy who’s too small for that other guy.
I don’t like Canelo, he’s been cherry picking opponents for a long time, but he’s a pretty good boxer, he’s gotten a lot stronger as an almost middle-weight, and lately he’s been very good at scouting his opponents and following a strategy. Golovkin’s big weakness is a lack of defense, other than the good offense. Canelo will try to take advantage of that, he’s a decent counter-puncher and that’s the threat to Genady, if Alvarez can stay active without taking too much punishment then Golovkin may have a tough time winning a decision. I do hope to see Alvarez fold the way he did against Mayweather, but he’s a bigger better fight now and Golokin is not the kind of hard time that Mayweather was.
Boxing has become to corrupt. Ill never buy a PPV again.
Become? It’s been way worse than this.
I’ve seen a lot of commentary along these lines, but I don’t get it.
A typical corrupt decision would be where a fighter should have lost 118-110 and instead wins 115-113. The judge is corruptly giving the guy a full five rounds that he doesn’t deserve, but the motivation for the egregious scorecard is that all five rounds are needed to change the verdict in the fight. In this case, Alvarez should (perhaps) have lost 115-113 and instead won 118-110. What would be the corrupt motivation for that? Why would a corrupt judge have made it as egregious as 118-110 if she could have accomplished the same thing by 115-113?
Unless there’s a huge amount of money being bet on the specific scores (never heard of such a thing) I don’t see it at all. It looks like pure incompetence to me.
It does look like incompetence. This judge has had controversial decisions before. The corruption aspect is hard to pin directly on this one, but it still fits into the corrupt structure of boxing. The Nevada commission can be lauded for their concern for the health of fighters, many other states cede to their decisions on suspensions and eligibility of fighter because they take the time and trouble to keep track of the boxers. But at the same time they seem to have no regard for the integrity of judging fights. They have already announced that Adalaide Byrd will continue to judge title fights, they see nothing wrong with one judge who disagrees with nearly everyone on earth about calling particular rounds or an entire fight. I don’t know whether or not they seriously investigate cases where corruption in judging is evident but I do know that they don’t review cases of incompetence like this. There is little in the way of standards for judging fights anywhere in the world, judges have free rein to decide who wins a round of boxing on any basis, they may simply say “I think this boxer won the round” no matter what happens in the ring.
This was not a close fight, there have been plenty of controversial decisions where one round either way makes the difference and the viewing public which is generally not forming an opinion on a round by round basis finds the end result distasteful. Not the case here at all, the judge who scored the fight even is also questionable, more likely to have been corrupt in the decision than the one giving a lopsided victory to Alvarez. But that won’t make a difference, there’s no motivation to change this system. We want to see the big fights, we want to see the best in the world face each other, this and all the other terrible decisions in boxing matches don’t impact the business end of this sport, in this case it produces a monetary benefit as a rematch is planned that will generate even more revenue.
There may be no solution. The sport of amateur boxing has been seriously diluted through a system of judging by numbers without removing the corruption in judging. Some of the inexplicable decisions of the past have come from otherwise respectable judges. Incompetent judges can be suspended, payoffs can be investigated, but we’ll always have to rely on the ability of judges to score rounds that often enough cannot be solidly established as going one way or the other and bad decisions will continue.
Anyway, despite the bad ending it was a very good fight. GGG fought as I expected, no surprise because that’s the way he always fights. He was a little more cautious than usual, also no surprise because Canelo is the best opponent he ever faced. Canelo managed to impress me, he was very well prepared for the fight, even when getting hit he maintained his defense by turning away from punches and his counter-punching kept Golovkin from having an easy time of it. He lost that fight, but he was game.
Her scoring is not going unnoticed.
To my eye it looks like she’s suspended from judging.
Well that’s a lot better news than the report yesterday that indicated at worst she had an off night and she’d be judging fights again without a break. The one interest the boxing Nevada officials might have is their own jobs, and the very real possibility of corruption not yet uncovered.