The King is coming back home with Saul Canelo Alvarez (58-2-2, 39 KOs) returning to Guadalajara, Mexico, to defend his undisputed super middleweight championship against John Ryder (32-5, 18 KOs) at the 48,000-seat Estadio Akron Stadium in Guadalajara, Mexico on May 6th LIVE on DAZN PPV. Canelo-Ryder will be on DAZN pay-per-view in U.S. and Canada.
For the former four-division world champion Canelo, it’s his first time fighting in Mexico since his fifth round knockout win over Kermit Cintron in November 2011 at the Plaza de Toros, Mexico City, Mexico.
This is a fight that Canelo’s promoter Eddie Hearn has been chomping at the bit for quite some time, as he also promotes Ryder, so it’s a situation where two of his fighters are taken care of at the same time. Canelo needs a tune-up, whereas Ryder is getting his first and perhaps his last big payday unless he wins.
Alvarez is coming off a 12 round unanimous decision win over Gennadiy Golovkin last September. Canelo complained after the fight that he’d been dealing with a left wrist injury, and he wanted to have surgery on it to repair the problem.
The subsequent surgery was a success, and now Canelo will take a mini-tune-up against the 34-year-old ‘The Gorilla Ryder. If Canelo loses this fight, it could be the end of his career. It’s one thing getting beaten by elite fighters like Dmitry Bivol, but quite another matter of losing to a fringe-level super middleweight like Ryder.
Technically, Ryder is ranked #1 with the WBO, but that’s only because the division is watered down with four sanctioning bodies like all the weight class. In reality, Ryder should arguably be ranked at this spot:
1. David Benavidez
2. David Morrell
3. Caleb Plant
4. Diego Pacheco
5. Kevin Sadjo
6. Demetrius Andrade
7. Lerrone Richards
8. Anthony Dirrell
9. Bektemir Melikuziev
10. John Ryder
There are a lot of better fighters than Ryder that are getting passed up by Canelo, but he wants to make sure he wins this fight.
Canelo has looked terrible in his last two fights, and some fans believe he’s shot. His last performance against a faded 40-year-old Golovkin should have been a blowout, as the Kazakhstan fighter looked slow and a shell of the fighter he’d been.
However, Canelo had nothing left in the tank in the second half of the contest and allowed Golovkin to creep back into it. In the end, Canelo still won a 12 round decision, but he could have lost if Golovkin had fought hard in the first half of the fight instead of fighting defensively and holding frequently.
“I feel really happy to be coming back in May because following my surgery, I was unsure of when I’d be coming back,” said Canelo. “Returning to the ring and coming back to fight in Jalisco, where I’m from, makes me especially happy. And in John Ryder, I’m facing a very competitive fighter.”
This could be a sellout crowd at the Akron Stadium to see Canelo fight, but we’ll have to see. If Canelo were facing a more viable opponent like Benavidez, Morrell, or Plant, it would be a guaranteed sold-out venue, as those are guys that the Mexican boxing fans would like to see him fight.
What’s interesting is that the Canelo-Ryder fight will be shown on DAZN PPV rather than on regular DAZN. We know that Canelo is popular, but he’s fighting an unknown with five losses in Ryder, who has not been considered a threat to defeating Alvarez.
With the increase of the subscription prices on DAZN, it would have been a kind gesture to subscribers to have this fight on non-PPV because it’s going to be a double whammy for them to be asked to pay to watch Canelo fight a no-name with five losses after the recent increase in the subscription rates.
The card will stream live on DAZN in over 200 countries and is set to get underway at 5 p.m. ET local time in Guadalajara, which is 7 p.m. EDT / 12 a.m. BST / 1 a.m. CET, with the main event ringwalks scheduled for 11 p.m. ET / 4 a.m. BST / 5 a.m. CET. These timings could change due to the length of the undercard fights.
