By Keith Idec
NEW YORK – Daniel Geale is certain Miguel Cotto is going to try to take him out early Saturday night at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center.
The 34-year-old Geale figures Cotto will follow the Gennady Golovkin blueprint for beating him. But the former middleweight champion from Australia also is confident Cotto, also 34, won’t be able to duplicate Golovkin’s success in their scheduled 12-round fight for Cotto’s WBC middleweight title (HBO; 10:30 p.m. ET/7:30 p.m. PT).
Kazakhstan’s Golovkin (33-0, 30 KOs) floored Geale (31-3, 16 KOs) twice, once apiece in the second and third rounds, before their WBA middleweight title fight was halted in the third round July 26 at Madison Square Garden. It was the lone knockout defeat of Geale’s 10-year pro career.
“I expect [Cotto] to come out extremely hard in the first few rounds,” Geale said Tuesday, before a press conference in Manhattan. “After watching the Golovkin fight, they think they can stop me. He’s going to put everything into that. When that doesn’t happen, that’s when I’ll do my thing. I think he’ll be in for a big surprise because I’m not here to give up. I’m looking forward to a hard fight. I want that pressure. I want him to come at me.”
An aggressive approach served Cotto very well early in his last fight. The four-division champion from Puerto Rico dropped Argentina’s Sergio Martinez (51-3-2, 28 KOs) three times in the first round of their middleweight title fight last June 7 at The Garden. Cotto (39-4, 32 KOs) knocked down Martinez again in the ninth on his way to a TKO victory before the start of the 10th round.
Keith Idec covers boxing for The Record and Herald News, of Woodland Park, N.J., and BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.