When it comes to preparing for Canelo Alvarez, it is a near impossible task for Rocky Fielding trainer Jamie Moore, but Moore was up to the task.
In a recent media call, Moore touched on the difficulty that is finding sparring partners that can accurately mimic Alvarez's style for Fielding as they reach closer to their world title later this month. As Alvarez is one of the world's best pound-for-pound boxers, Moore said no combination of sparring partners can fully provide what the Mexican champion brings to the ring so Moore simply looks for sparring partners that can bring certain elements of Alvarez's game to training camp.
“He’s obviously a very difficult task when you’re talking about an elite level fighter at the top of the pound-for-pound list. How do you get sparring to match that? You really can’t. In my opinion, you have to take out the best attributes that fighter has, someone with a really sharp jab like Canelo. We wanted to get a sparring partner for a really good jab. Then you got to get all the different and best parts and attributes as well and cover those with different sparring partners, but you never necessarily can have all those covered with one sparring partner or maybe two. You have to have a sort of different range of it," Moore said.
But it takes more than sparring partners to get Fielding ready for the fight against Alvarez on December 15. Moore added that he wanted to create drills for Fielding to get him to actively react to any situation that can happen in the ring. Moore had been a fan of Alvarez for years and had been studying him and believes he has his timing and mannerisms down ahead of the fight so Fielding will be all the more ready for the biggest fight of his career.
"Me, personally, I like to do a lot of tactical work, drills, different combinations of the punch selections that I feel would work in different fights. I’ll pick that out early in training camp and we’ll drill it and drill it and drill it because I like for him to understand what I want him to do on the night [of the fight] well in advance and then by the time the fight comes around, we drilled it so much that it becomes second nature. As soon as he enters a certain situation, he responds to it without thinking about. We nail that down early on and I am a big fan of Canelo for many years so it didn’t take me long to pick up on his rhythm and his timing, his shot selection, stuff that he does well. The opportunities I feel that Rocky will get to him, we drill it and Rocky’s just pulling on exactly when I wanted him to,” Moore said.
The fight, for Fielding's WBA "regular" super middleweight championship, is set to headline a card at Madison Square Garden that will be streamed on DAZN. It will be Alvarez's first title fight at 168 pounds while it is Fielding's first world title defense.
Fightful will have live coverage of the event, which will feature multiple world title fights. You can listen to the audio of Morre talking to Fightful in the video above with additional commentary from Fielding talking his size advantage over Alvarez.
