Kelly Pavlik’s Strategy: Pressure Canelo Alvarez Early to Exhaust Him

Kelly Pavlik says Terence Crawford should pressure Canelo Alvarez hard in the early rounds to attempt to tire him out in their fight on September 13th. The former middleweight champion Pavlik, because Alvarez (63-2-2, 39 KOs) will fade by the seventh round if Crawford (41-0, 31 KOs) forces him to fight at a fast pace.

Fighting like that would require that Crawford get hit by a fresh Canelo, and he would need a good chin to handle the power. For the 38-ish-year-old Crawford to be getting bit repeatedly to the head and body early in the fight, it would be asking a lot of the Omaha, Nebraska native.

Early Rounds, Canelo Fades

“I wouldn’t stay in one stance long enough for Canelo to figure out. That’s going to be a huge thing,” said Kelly Pavlik to Fight Hub TV about Terence Crawford needing to change stances to confuse Canelo Alvarez.

It’s doubtful that Crawford is going to confuse Canelo by frequently changing stances during the fight.  Alvarez has fought plenty of fighters who have changed stances during his career, and it hasn’t worked.

Crawford’s Opponent Quality

Against the weak opposition that Terence has mostly fought during his career, it didn’t matter that he switched from southpaw to orthodox repeatedly. He was going to beat them using any stance because they were weak fighters. People lack the insight to look at the opposition that Crawford has built his 41-0 record on, and figure out that he could have just stayed in the southpaw stance to beat them in the same way.

“Stay on Canelo’s a** early on. Put Canelo behind. Even if it’s three out of the first four rounds, because when Canelo has to fight, after seven rounds, he starts to fade a little bit,: said Pavlik. “We’ve seen that with Bivol. We’ve seen that with a lot of his fights with GGG. When Canelo can control the fight and ring generalship, yeah, he can fight 12 rounds pretty good.”

Crawford’s Durability Concerns

Crawford can’t stay on top of Canelo the way that Gennadiy Golovkin and Dmitry Bivol did because he’s not as big, tough, or as powerful as those fighters. We’ve seen Crawford hurt by smaller guys. GGG and Bivol took huge punches from Canelo. They were able to do it due to their size and chins. Crawford is too fragile to brawl with Canelo the way Pavlik wants him to.

“But when Canelo gets pushed early on in a fight, he starts to face muscle endurance-wise,” said Pavlik. “If I were Crawford, I would [pressure] him in the early rounds. Make him have to play catch-up in rounds three, four, and five. Then by round seven, that’s when he can really step it up.”

Crawford took a lot of punishment in his last fight against ‘Little GGG’ Israil Madrimov when he stopped running and began to press him in the championship rounds. While it worked, it resulted in Crawford eating repeated right-hand power shots from Madrimov, which made those rounds difficult to score. The bigger and harder punches were landed by Madrimov when Terence attacked.