Re-Imagining Mayweather-Marquez: A Technical Summary (Part 2)

Round 3

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Here, Marquez lands a few grazing right hands. It’s in these moments at mid-range when Floyd ducks low that JMM needs to be more tenacious. He’s not likely to command the clinch at any point in their respective careers, so when he does get inside, being physical and getting leverage on his shots should be a priority. The lesser the functional weight disparity between the two is, the better JMM’s chances are at doing so.
Here, Marquez is able to evade Floyd’s lead right as he lunges with it, and sneak a left uppercut inside.

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Countering Floyd’s leads and keeping a lookout for them is smart. There are a number of scenarios where Floyd has walked into punches once he’s made to lead, but few fighters are smart enough to do it. As an overall strategy, this tempo might work at the lower weights, where JMM was sharper, quicker, and Floyd was less defensively sound, or now, where Floyd relies on his speed to be more of an offensive fighter and Marquez is still an adept mover.

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JMM’s lateral movement is a key to his game, and he should have made more use of it against Floyd offensively, despite the fact his real specialty is defensive lateral movement. When Floyd ducks like that, he is planted. Here, JMM takes advantage of that by spinning as he leads with his left to then exploit his position and land a right hand over the top.

For a large part of the round, JMM has constantly been muscled out of clinches. He’s not a fighter who often works ruggedly out of a clinch and rarely initiates one, but he can’t simply allow himself to be tied up like that. Given the explosive legwork and squats he’s been doing, his priority in a rematch should be to press back with his arms up at his chin and then explode to the body. A younger Marquez would do well to hop in and out himself, picking his shots and returning to the center to deny Mayweather the range to counter.

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Here, Marquez’s underused jab is again put to use, landing a slapping hook over Floyd’s right glove.

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Here, JMM does a similar move to what he did earlier, feinting Floyd to the ropes, and leading with a right hand over the top. Great way to get over that shoulder.

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Mods, whatever you do, please don't delete these threads, I spent a lot of time formatting them, have mercy and merge them if the thread traffic is too much.

 

Over-examine? I went round by round, picked Marquez's best shots, and picked his biggest obstacles. Then I wrote a few sentences per round about it. It's not over-examination, it's thorough.

 

To my eyes it looks like it catches Floyd on top of the head, it's why his head jerks and his eyes close. And that's the only close call I see.