The Rough With the Smooth: Canelo Alvarez and the Art of Crudeness
Photo by Al Bello/Getty Images
Last week, Saul Alvarez became the second man this year to unify a division, taking Plant’s IBF title to complete his super-middleweight collection. It wasn’t an entirely typical performance from him, rougher and in some respects seeming to be cruder than normal for him. That wouldn’t be an entirely meritless thought at first glance, since he appeared not to be using some tools available to him, but it seems very likely that these were deliberate choices to deal specifically with Caleb Plant’s tools and weakspots. Today we’ll have a look at why.
The two things immediately notable from the opening bell were the Mexican’s almost complete lack of a jab, and just behind that the fact that he didn’t appear to be moving his head as much as usual. Both of these things are red flags at first glance — after all, a jab is the most basic element of a boxer’s game, and Canelo is famed for his head movement both defensively and in setting up his own punches.
A typical image from the opening rounds, where not much is happening but Canelo appears to be letting Plant’s jab go atypically unpunished. We can see here that Plant throws his jab from low down, making it difficult to duck under.
It can quickly be seen, however, that both these things had to do with dealing with Plant’s own jab. It was thrown from the waist, to start with, and that immediately explains the head movement. It’s not that Canelo was marching forward stiff as a board, the movement was there. But he’s known for flashy slips under opponent’s punches and that’s hard to do when a punch is coming from (and returning to) that low down, so he didn’t. Instead he’d lean back or around just a bit, or parry, and (after a mostly exploratory first round) then follow the jab in as Plant brought it back to his waist.
Alvarez has long been good at using his opponent’s jab to time his own work (this is why he’s beating several fighters with excellent jabs but shallow wider games with little difficulty). In this fight, he took that to an extreme. Usually he still makes at least some effort to win the jab battle itself, but here in the early rounds he rarely bothered, instead concentrating on closing off space as quickly as possible. This served a double purpose: the first one was pretty much intimidation, looking to make Plant hesitant to throw his own jab (which worked, and after a while Plant grew tentative enough about throwing his that Canelo brought his back into play), but the second was to break down the next part of Plant’s defence. To understand how, we need to take a quick detour to look at Plant’s shell.
As we, and especially Taylor, mentioned in our preview of the fight, Plant is one of those rare boxers fighting today using a shoulder-roll based shell guard who actually seems to understand what it’s for. He’s aware that just sticking your shoulder out in front of you and wiggling it around isn’t necessarily going to do a lot for you. At longer and mid-ranges especially, he’s well-positioned in it, stance set so that the route to the targets that aren’t directly covered (his head, lower right side) is off the center line or obstructed. It’s good for his offensive work too, low hands making it easier to disguise where a counterpunch is going and with decent use of that shoulder roll to get good angles for a lead-hand hook.
Even though he’s not in an outwardly defensive position, Plant’s stance while jabbing at this range leaves his head off center line, meaning he doesn’t have to do very much to slip Canelo’s countering jab. As he does so, he also puts himself into further good position to work the body.
All this makes Plant quite a tough guy to engage with at middle and outside ranges. Canelo probably could have done so successfully anyway, given that he’s one of the best boxers in the world exchanging at mid-range, and he did have success doing so when responding to Plant’s work in that range, but when he was the initiator mostly he didn’t bother, instead looking to take advantage of the fact that all this does tend to fall apart a bit at close range. Plant doesn’t have as much of a handle on the placement and positioning of his guard when his feet are more square, and when he’s pushed to the ropes that obviously tends to happen more commonly. Canelo’s come-in-fast-behind-Plant’s-jab tactics therefore were both getting in close per se, but also doing so in a manner that would fluster Plant and push him to the ropes even faster, without giving him time to think.
The angle of approach was important to breaking the shell too. Some fighters would find space round the flank of a stance like that by getting in first and then stepping around here and there once in close, but Canelo isn’t a dancer of that sort, so mostly he’d aim his first approach specifically to one side of Plant, and aim to crunch shots home behind the elbow (quite frequently, he’d step to Plant’s left but throw left hooks to his right side). Plant didn’t really have the reactions to deal with this — rather than flattening out his stance and protecting his ribs, he’d turn around even further and almost show his back (which led to some of the right-handed shots from Canelo being probably on the illegal side, but that didn’t bother the aggressor at all). These shots almost invariably caused Plant to jump a bit, and compromised his stance further, and that brought head shots into play. That he wasn’t particularly bothered about these shots looking slick — a left-handed shot to the right side of an opponent from some way around to their left is never going to be textbook clean - may also have added to that narrative from some about Canelo looking off, but it got the job done.
Canelo steps in behind a Plant jab, throws a left to the midsection, and follows with a jopping right over the top. For added roughhousing points, he also leaves his left hand in after hooking, slides it up and uses it to clear Plant’s guard out of the way and further open the route for the overhand. You can see that reactions that serve well at longer range let him down here- leaning to his right opens him up, Canelo’s left hand splits and tangles the shell guard, and when he tries to spin to his left he fails to first make space and turns shoulder-first into Canelo.
To mess with Plant still further, what Canelo would sometimes do from that position is throw his left hand in short, letting Plant slip it to the outside, and then just leave it there and lean on. That’s definitely blurring the line between head manipulation and just plain being dirty, but he mostly got away with it apart from a couple of egregiously obvious instances, and this started to get to Plant’s confidence too.
Not dissimilar to the above, but this time Canelo exploits Plant’s tendency to lean right by just popping his left hand up there and shoving him down, so much so that his elbow comes way off the side it was protecting.
Ultimately you can see all this come together in the knockdown that began the end of the fight. At this point Canelo doesn’t even have to throw that right to the body to make Plant jump — the American throws a double jab, but it’s tentative and when he sees Canelo slip to the outside of it he brings his hand back to his body very quickly and with a bit of a flinch. This leaves him out of position, so when Alvarez instead throws a left to the head, he is not at all well positioned to either avoid it or move with it and is rocked. After that, his reactions are gone and he leans into the uppercut that knocks him down without really being aware of what’s happening.
Jumping in as with this hook wouldn’t be considered good form in most situations, but from this position Plant’s left hand is in no position to counter and Canelo is too far around to Plant’s left for the right to be effective from that stance — further showing that it’s not always about textbook clean form.
So there you have it. In boxing, roughness in the right places is also an art, and Canelo deployed it skillfully to get through a tricky opponent. There aren’t too many fighters who gameplan as well as the Mexican great, if any, and despite not looking as smooth as he sometimes can he played it to perfection this time too.