By Rob Smith: WBC middleweight champion Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. (46-0-1, 32 KO’s) believes that his opponent Sergio Martinez (49-2-2, 28 KO’s) will be using a lot of movement on September 15th to try and keep away from his heavy pressure in their HBO fight at the Thomas & Mack Center, in Las Vegas, Nevada. However, the 26-year-old Chavez Jr. doesn’t see Martinez having much success in trying to keep away from him.
Chavez Jr. said to Max Kellerman of HBO on their recent Chavez Jr-Martinez face off with Kellerman: “The ring is square like this. [Chavez Jr. then uses his hand to draw an imaginary square on the table]. You can’t get out.”
Martinez: “Neither can you.”
Martinez will likely fight Chavez Jr. as he’d done against past slow-footed sluggers such as Kelly Pavlik and Alex Bunema by using constant movement mixed in with periodic attacks. Martinez probably won’t throw a lot of punches, but he’ll make his shots count by landing the harder shots. The much heavier Chavez Jr. has little choice but to try and cut off the ring on Martinez to try and force to fight on the inside, as Chavez Jr. doesn’t have great skills on the outside, and he won’t be able to move a lot without taking a big risk that he may tire out like we’ve seen him do in some of his past fights. Tiring out against a fighter like Matt Vanda is one thing, but if Chavez Jr. fades against Martinez he could get knocked out.
Chavez Jr. wants Martinez to stand in front of him so that he can get his body shots off and use his huge weight advantage to bully the lighter Martinez. In looking at training video of Chavez Jr. from Saturday, he looks to be in the 180s easily. That weight isn’t going to disappear by September 15th, so it’s almost guaranteed that Chavez Jr will weight in the neighborhood of the low 180s when he steps inside the ring to fight Martinez. For his part, Martinez will probably be around 165 lbs and he’ll have to deal with giving away between 15 to 20 pounds in weight to Chavez Jr. It’s going to be tough because it’ll be like as middleweight fighting a light heavyweight or cruiserweight. Sometimes size doesn’t mean anything but it can if the two fighters are of equal talent. The WBC doesn’t have a weight rehydration rule, meaning that Chavez Jr. can rehydrate up to whatever weight he wants as long as he makes the 160 pound weigh-in limit.