Charlo vs. Castano: The Fight Site Predictions
BROOKLYN, NY - APRIL 22: Jermell Charlo defeats Charles Hatley by TKO in the 6th in their WBC Junior Middleweight fight. Charlo is shown here at the end of the fight in victory. April 22, 2017 at The Barclays Center April 22, 2017 (Photo by Bill Tompkins/Getty Images)
Jermell Charlo hasn’t taken an easy road to the top. The younger (just) of Louisiana’s boxing twins, the one fighting at 154 instead of middleweight, may have received criticism in the past for the talking he’s done outside of the ring, but in it, in the last few years he’s piled up a resume (including taking revenge for his sole loss) that has put him in contention for a spot on many people’s p4p top ten ratings, a spot he’ll be aiming to solidify on Saturday, as he aims to pick up the final belt in his division and become boxing’s newest undisputed champion. Our boxing team gets into it.
Mateusz Fenrych: Undisputed titles are ten-a-penny all of a sudden! The lighter Charlo, in my view will likely be favourite to retain his own multiple titles and add Argentine Brian Castano’s belt to his collection on Saturday. My reasoning is thus:
Actually, one factor renders the foundation for my reasoning quite simple really - physicality.
Castano is an impressive fighter in many respects. He’s pretty fast and has a nice line in combination punching (with caveats, as I’ll get to in a bit), and keeps a nice pace, too.
He has a quick jab, and equally quick straight-punching that follows closely. He’s also perfectly willing to throw to the body; against Teixera he adopted a nice straight to his taller opponent’s body, which will be very important against an opponent as well conditioned as one of the Charlos.
But my previous point on his opponent’s size is telling; while Castano has visited several weight classes in his pro career, he’s generally stuck around the mid-150s mark, but lately he’s been notably outsized by his opponents, such as the aforementioned Teixera and Nigeria’s Wale Otomoso.
OK, so he prevailed against those guys, and pretty handily too, but against someone like Erislandy Lara, who has effective range tools and knows how to build off them, he had trouble closing the distance enough to do his business up close.
Now, it should be noted that while Charlo does have range weapons, they tend to be a lunging, long jab or straight, and he doesn’t often build off them. In fact, he can be relatively crude early on in fights, while paradoxically sharpening up as the fight goes on, beginning the fight throwing wild hooks before he has timing and distance down but tightening up with time.
Castano tends to be sharp right out the gate, so early on it wouldn’t be a shock to see Charlo getting touched up early with sharp, linear punching while his punches travel the long way around.
But, and here is where physicality comes into play; Castano does not have dam-busting power, and Charlo has a decent chin.
While he has had to use it a little too often in his time, particularly against the likes of Tony Harrison, he also uses that chin as a means to get counters off, and boy can he crack some.
He also uses it to get his range and so on, and while Castano is very well conditioned, unfortunately for him so is Jermell. The way I see this going is Charlo getting bruised up a little in the first half of the fight, but ultimately winning an attritional TKO5-8.
Lukasz Fenrych: Charlo won’t have it all his own way in this fight, I agree, and this will certainly be a fight worth watching for more than just the occasion. Castano, is unbeaten (one draw, against Erisnady Lara), and he’ll step into the ring as a classic, poised pressure fighter, one with the skills to draw the best out of Charlo if he wants to achieve his aim.
Charlo is, as my brother noted, a slightly odd fighter to parse, because he’s clearly very good at what he does but he can come across as quite basic for someone at this level. I’d say that most of his issues are sins of omission: he doesn’t make an awful lot of outright mistakes (the loopy, lunging distance shots mentioned above aside), but sometimes he just lacks the layers of set-up work you’d expect from a fighter of this calibre. He wades in with his gloves up and does rely on either that basic guard or just taking it on the chin to let his opponent do the work he needs to find his reads. That was what got him in trouble against Tony Harrison the first time- okay, he has a pretty strong argument to have won that fight anyway, but Harrison was more in the fight than Charlo needed to let him be because too much of the successful work he did came after Harrison had already landed. This was broadly true in the second fight too: Charlo ultimately won that cleanly via KO, but until the first knockdown in the 11th round, though he was the far busier man, it’s questionable whether more of his work was actually landing, for the same reason.
Let’s not get too down though. He has a good, solid, all-terrain game, comfortable fighting both backwards and forwards and both inside and at range, and while it may be true that he needs his opponent to hit him to do his best work, the opposite is also true - it’s almost impossible for even very good opponents to land on him without taking punishment in return. And while he does takes more shots than he probably needs to, he’s rarely out of stance when taking them, so he can absorb the shots better than someone who’s off-balance. That’s what got him the knockout against Harrison in their revenge fight, ultimately, and it did for his most recent opponent, Jeison Rosario, too - the Dominican looked safe enough as long as all he did was jab, but every exchange seemed to get him into trouble, and he eventually took enough damage that a very innocuous jab to the body sent him down for good.
That, I think, will be the ultimate decider of this fight too. Castano as mentioned in the intro is a collected, cool pressure fighter who in many ways is a more creative offensive boxer than Charlo is- unlike the American, he will set up his work, throwing varied combinations behind a busy jab, and searching for answers high and low if a defence doesn’t immediately break for him, willing to get rough and shove about to force his opening too. That will be part of his problem - he’s not too likely to get much joy out of shoving Charlo around, not just because he’s bigger but because, as mentioned, Charlo tends to fight off a very stable base which makes him hard to shove as much as it helps with absorbing damage.
The other thing that I see turning the tables, though, is that where I mentioned before that Charlo’s problems are those of omission, that isn’t true of Castano. He does make out-and-out technical errors, the most notable of which in this fight is probably going to be his bad habit of only closing the distance behind a jab part-way and then leaping/lunging the rest of the way as a shortcut. When you combine that with his tendency to hang around after he’s landed- probably related, as it’s harder to move out safely if you’re already off-balance when you move in- and line it up against Charlo’s mentioned desire to clock his opponent while he works, the most likely scenario here is that Castano, though he’ll definitely land and possibly be winning on the cards for a long stretch here, will probably take more damage than he can deal with as the fight goes on. I’ll go for Charlo KO 8 or thereabouts, with the caveat that if Castano’s chin does hold out he may well steal the upset on points.
Taylor: Keeping it nice and simple here, as my colleagues have pretty much covered all of the main points. I’m a little higher on Castano than Mateusz and Lukasz, and I think that the Argentine will bank rounds on activity and build up a steady lead. But his aggression will ultimately play into Charlo’s hands, giving ‘Mell opportunities to land some bombs on the counter (watch out in particular for that left hook). I can see Castano withstanding Charlo’s firepower at first, but ultimately shipping more damage than he’s able to dish out and getting broken down late. That being said, if this goes the distance I’d favour Castano on the cards. Charlo TKO 11.