Saul Alvarez and Gennady Golovkin stepped into the ring for the third and final time on Saturday night. The winner was clear, the scores controversially close — especially those two 7-5 cards, but Bloody Elbow had it 8-4 ourselves so we can’t quibble too much about that. We won’t spend much time litigating that here though. Instead we’ll take a look at the story of the fight, why Canelo was so dominant early and why (scores aside) he did seem to fade a bit later to allow Golovkin at least some success.
The Breakdown
A clue to the latter can be found right from the start. After an opening exchange of jabs, the first meaningful punch Canelo threw was a massive left hand that missed, left him overbalanced, and needed some snappy recovery work to get away from danger. He calmed it down for the rest of the opening round, in which nothing major happened, but after that those swinging punches and explosive movements both to close ground and recover were a feature of the fight. There was clearly a gameplan going on there – whether emotional, in anger at Golovkin, or coldly rational, reasoning that Golovkin would find it difficult to respond to these, we can’t know, but either way they had their effect early on.
Golovkin’s age is the sad part of this equation — four years ago he’d never have allowed someone over-committing in front of him to get away with it, but this time he just couldn’t get himself moving fast enough to close distance and respond. That gap in response was visible for him against Murata in April, and that must have been in Canelo’s mind when he came up with the plan.
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