One of many question marks about WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (41-0-1, 30 KO’s) going into his April 20th fight against WBA junior middleweight champion Austin Trout (26-0, 14 KO’s) is whether Canelo’s stamina will hold up for the full 12 rounds in a fast paced fight.
We’ve seen how Canelo has looked tired in his fights against Ryan Rhodes, Matthew Hatton, Alfonso Gomez, and Shane Mosley, and those were fights where he was allowed to plod for the full fight and not have to move quickly to catch up to a fighter on the move like he will against a constantly moving Trout at the Alamodome in San Antonio, Texas.
Canelo looked like he didn’t have a lot of excess energy in the gas tank any of those fights, which is perhaps why he seemed to pace himself and fight flat-footed in each one of them. They were all mismatches, yet Canelo wasn’t take to take it out of 2nd gear to put these guys away quickly. He did stop Rhodes and Gomez, but it took a lot longer than it should have, and I don’t buy the excuse that his fans make that Canelo did this on purpose.
I think he has a hard time getting out of 2nd gear because of an internal worry that he might somehow gas out if he’s forced to fight hard.
The thing is Trout is going to make the inexperienced 22-year-old Canelo work a lot harder than he’s used to, and that could be a bad thing for Canelo if he doesn’t have the stamina resources to fight at a high level. If Canelo is forced to chase Trout around in the first six rounds, we could see Canelo gasping for breath in the last six rounds and losing badly. In that case he could end up getting schooled in this fight.
Trout has looked good in his recent wins over Miguel Cotto, Delvin Rodriguez, Frank LoPorto and David Lopez. Those were all easy fights for him, even the Cotto fight. Trout looked better against Cotto than Floyd Mayweather Jr. did.