Lol @ these responses. Canelo couldn't even stop Cotto. An AGED Cotto at that. He never even badly hurt Cotto. It took Hopkins 11 rounds of sustained of sustained punishment to stop Trinidad. Trinidad beats the Hell outta Canelo 154. He was plain and simple a better fighter. Canelo would win at the higher weights, but that's purely on size. Prime-for-prime, Tito was a level above Canelo. Canelo was, is, and continues to be... one of, if not THE MOST overrated fighter in the history of boxing.
I don't think that Alvarez had developed the good upper body movement with the rolling, slipping and punch picking that he had at 160 and 168, only made worse by the questionable stamina caused by having to cut too much weight to get down to 154. Trinidad had his own limitations at the weight (however much people wilfully ignore the less than straightforward fights with Vargas and Reid), but Canelo failing to separate himself from past it old man Shane and the very beatable Cotto, and looking clueless against the old, smaller and insular incarnation of Mayweather doesn't lend to him being favoured over the still very good (if straight lines, loading up, hook happy) version of Tito from around the turn of the millennium. Even at middleweight, being much improved, he still couldn't really effortlessly or precisely integrate his feet with his upper body and punch picking in the way Hopkins could, nor was he as spiteful or dirty at roughing up opponents who were more polite and correct. Obviously you'd have a job putting a mark in him with an axe, so he'd be on his feet at the end with no reason for doing any worse than Vargas imo. Winning the odd round and landing the occasional eye catching counter or maybe scoring an early knockdown, or able to block/catch a chunk of Trinidad's hooks on his forearms, but probably soundly outworked and punched into a semi-hesitant, low output shell. 9-3, 8-4ish type of loss. It gets a bit forgotten that he was looked upon for a good length of time with slight derision by plenty for the excessive, unwarranted level of hype and ridiculous bias in the earlier stage of his career. I don't recall it being a massive shock at the time the way Mayweather easily beat him tbh. It was only when he started to genuinely improve around the time of the Golovkin fights that everyone softened on him as I recall, and that he showed that he'd actually become a very good fighter, which in itself quickly got out of control when his more honed style and relatively old school approach carried up well against larger but far more limited fighters.
