After the boxing clinic WBA light heavyweight champion Dmitry Bivol performed on Canelo Alvarez last Saturday night, fans now believe Gennadiy Golovkin has a chance of beating the Mexican star in September.
The way Canelo was soundly defeated by the 31-year-old Bivol, it’s possible that Golovkin can do the same thing by following the brilliant gameplan that Dmitry utilized in that masterclass performance.
It’s fair to say that if Golovkin can retool his offense and go from throwing single power shots to throwing sustained combinations like Bivol, he’ll beat Canelo and possibly knock him out.
It wasn’t surprising that Bivol was able to expose Canelo in this manner, as the Mexican star had shown these same flaws in his past fights. If you go back and watch the first fight with Golovkin, Canelo looked ragged in the closing seconds of the 12th round when GGG suddenly flurried on him.
What that flurry showed is that Canelo’s counter-punching form breaks down when his opponents attack him with sustained combinations of four or more punches consecutively.
Canelo shells up and is incapable of countering when attacked like this. Surprisingly, Golovkin didn’t learn from his first fight with Canelo to throw combinations and instead tried to use the Mayweather blueprint of throwing mainly jabs and single shots, which was never going to work against the popular Mexican star when it came to trying to win a decision.
Bivol and his trainer figured out Canelo’s weakness with his inability to handle combination punchers, so they took advantage of this flow to give him a boxing lesson last Saturday.
Canelo (57-2-2, 39 KOs) looked like a spent force after three rounds, showing age and a lot of ring-wear in his 12-round unanimous decision defeat against Bivol (20-0, 11 KOs).
Matchroom Boxing promoter Eddie Hearn says he would like for Canelo to take the trilogy fight with Golovkin (42-1-1, 41 KOs) on September 17th first before facing Bivol in a rematch.
“He [Canelo] said, ‘We’ll sit down with Eddy Reynoso, and we’ll talk,’ and obviously, the plan was to fight Gennadiy Golovkin. It’s still a huge fight,” said Eddie Hearn to iFL TV about Canelo Alvarez vs. Gennadiy Golovkin still being a massive fight despite the Mexican star’s loss to Dmitry Bivol.
“Funny enough, the Golovkin fight has become bigger now because people give Golovkin a chance to win the fight. Before, it was, ‘He’s 39, 40, whatever he is. He’s not going to win that fight.’
“Now, people look at that performance and say, ‘Okay, maybe Golovkin has more chance.’
“If he would have beaten Dmitry Bivol, people would have said, ‘The Golovkin fight, he’s a huge favorite now.’ He’s [Canelo] still a favorite, but it’s a huge fight, so we’ll see,” said Hearn.
