By Brian Webber: Gennadiy Golovkin (42-2-1, 37 KOs) says he made a “tactical mistake” by waiting too long to start his offense against Canelo Alvarez (58-2-2, 39 KOs) last Saturday night at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.
Golovkin didn’t start fighting with any kind of aggression until the eighth round, and at that point, Canelo seemed way ahead.
Ideally, the 40-year-old Golovkin’s adjustments should have been made as early as the third or fourth round.
It’s unclear why Golovkin took so long to ramp up his offense because it was obvious he was giving the fight away to former four-division world champion Canelo.
It is not known if Golovkin’s trainer, Johnathon Banks, asked him to start taking the fight to Canelo well before the eighth, considering he had to know they needed to make adjustments to the original game plan sooner.
“It was probably a tactical error on my part to start slow. On the other hand, he wanted to see how the fight would go. I think we both started slow,” Golovkin said after the fight.
It shouldn’t have taken an experienced fighter like Golovkin until the eighth round to “see how the fight went.” That makes no sense.
It just seemed like Golovkin was too timid to attack, knowing that Canelo would counter him and that would be risky.
Also, I think Golovkin looked very old and slow and unable to pull the trigger on his shots, even when there were openings.
Instead of letting his hands move the way he needed to win, Golovkin would wait and wait before finally taking a single shot. There was too much waiting on Golovkin’s part between punches, and it was the wrong way to fight Canelo.
“We did a little bit of reconnaissance, and that reconnaissance was probably too long for me,” Golovkin said. “It’s not up to me to talk about scoring. The judges came up with those scores. That is your decision.
“The strategy was to win the fight. We probably shouldn’t attribute my loss to strategy because I felt really good. Those minor shots that were successful from Canelo did not surprise me. I wasn’t that successful with my shots. In the end, the judges scored it in his favor.
“I didn’t feel any animosity with our rivalry. He was the one who said it was personal. My answer to that is, why did he wait so many years for this fight to happen? Golovkin said.
