Canelo vs Crawford Predictions: Two of this generation’s greats go into battle

Saul Canelo Alvarez will put the undisputed super middleweight championship of the world on the line this Saturday, September 13 against WBA super welterweight boss Terence Crawford. Netflix will screen this meeting of two of the best pound-for-pound fighters of this generation. Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, Nevada will be the epicentre of the sporting universe as boxing tries to steal the world’s gaze for the right reasons, for once.

Here are my Canelo vs Crawford predictions ahead of this historic, if imbalanced, match-up.

Canelo vs Crawford Odds

The Mexican superstar is 8/13 to pick up the win in this one, while Crawford settles into the uneasy role of 6/4. That gives 'Bud' an implied 40% chance of victory. The draw is priced at 14/1. Crawford has never had one, while Canelo suffered an early-career stalemate to Jorge Suarez and a much more prominent and hotly-debated one with great rival Gennady Golovkin.

Canelo vs Crawford Fight Preview

Immortality is hard to come by these days. While Floyd Mayweather and Mike Tyson throw more matches on the parchments that contain their respective legends, truly credible deathlessness is in short supply.

Oleksandr Usyk is one for the pantheon, of course. The four-belted heavyweight king has even drawn fanciful notions that thrashing Messrs Fury, Joshua and Dubois somehow surpasses a certain ‘Lip’ and his immortal evenings spent damaging Frazier, Foreman and Liston. Forgive these children, oh great pugilistic deity, they know not what they do.

Naoya Inoue will be immortalised too. ‘Monster’ is a kaiju you can fit in your pocket. Capable of widespread devastation the likes of which the lower weight categories scarcely endure. Those with short memories tried to level an accusation of homebody reluctance at his door. So ‘Kaibutsu’ has taken to smashing faces on periodic American jaunts too. 

The only other modern claimants to a place among the fistic inhabitants of Mount Olympus do battle on Saturday night. Canelo and Crawford are hewn from the same cloth, so much so that they are spanning an inadvisable crater of weight difference to bring us the closest thing boxing has had to a Four Kings throwback since ‘Sugar’, ‘Hitman’, ‘Hands of Stone’ and plain old Marvelous left for the skies.

Boxing is a sport that trades in extremes. Of spirit, Of will. Of violence. Of repugnance. Of the human condition. So let us begin with the extremity in which boxing stages much of its shadowplay. 

Crawford is a former lightweight champion of the world, the 135lbs division for the uninitiated. Canelo is a former light heavyweight champion of the world, for which the weight limit is 175lbs. These men have taken to the prize ring successfully at weights that sit a full 40lbs apart. Roughly the weight of a medium-sized microwave oven, or the force generated by my eye roll when Jake Paul vs Gervonta Davis was announced.

For clarity’s sake I will bring the weight issue up to date. Canelo is currently the super middleweight champion, or 168 of your pugilistic pounds. Crawford meanwhile is belted at super welterweight, wearing the WBA strap 14lbs lower than his quarry at 154lbs.

From a frightening disparity that would have made the dark age 50-round warriors wince to some plain old modern stupidity then. This year has already seen Conor Benn ascend from welterweight to not-beat former super middleweight Chris Eubank Jr. so impressively that he is currently preparing to not-beat him again. Canelo and Crawford’s match-up is daft, but this is boxing and there is always someone out there doing something dafter.

This superfight has two parents. One is proximity. Usyk is not fighting Inoue any time soon. The Japanese star would have been out-matched by the lightweight Crawford, never mind the super welterweight version. Canelo was once ambitious about a cruiserweight run, but even if Dmitry Bivol’s fists had not halted his ascent at light heavyweight, it is hard to see undisputed heavyweight world leader Usyk dropping back to his old 200lbs haunt. 

Therefore, Canelo-Crawford gives us our one quasi-realistic contest between two of the four banner fighters of this generation. The 2000-2010s period gave us Floyd Mayweather, Manny Pacquiao and the Canelo/Cotto/Hatton/De La Hoya/Mosley/Margarito supporting cast as a ruling class that congregated around welterweight. They did almost all fight each other at one point or another. But the 2020s’ cognoscenti are a wide-ranging bunch in divisional terms.

If proximity is the patriarch of this Netflix-hosted extravaganza, then the loving mother answers to the name of restlessness. What else is there for these two strident behemoths of boxing? 

Canelo is a four-weight world champion. The first undisputed champion in super middleweight history. A winner of 24 world title fights. Boxing’s most bankable star. The lodestone of the present-day sport. The rock-steady bridge from Mayweather, who Canelo fought aged 23, to the divine skills of Usyk, the pulsating power of Inoue and the silk and steel of Saturday’s foe.

Crawford too has run out of worlds to conquer. That much was apparent from the radio silence that followed his career-defining thrashing of Errol Spence in 2023. ‘Bud’ walked into a 50-50 scrap on paper. The boxing world believed Crawford had found a rival that could last him the rest of his career. But Crawford was not looking for an epic story arc, he was looking for a short-form horror story. He found one in the seven rounds it took Terence to banish Spence from whence he came. 

Then, for a year there was nothing. Perhaps Crawford really did allow himself the indulgence of Alexander’s tears before realising he could simply conquer again at another weight. The conquering was not nearly as emphatic but was, at least in the eye of your chronicler, deeply impressive. 

While Spence was a canvas splayed expertly upon which Crawford could paint his regal dominance, WBA super welterweight kingpin Israil Madrimov forced the renaissance painter to think like a cubist. The defending champion offered footwork, angles and an indomitable march that unsettled a fighter used to having everything his own way. But Crawford endured, adapted and emerged with both the WBA and vacant WBO interim titles. Another division upon which ‘Bud’ made an artist’s impression.

Given the fact Crawford has been out of the ring for another year since his maiden 154lb voyage, the Madrimov win and its merits are largely what punters are judging this Canelo fight on. The Kazakh lost his subsequent fight to Vergil Ortiz, with some suggesting that Crawford’s struggles with Madrimov expose a frailty. Anyone saying that did not watch the fiercely-competitive thriller between Madrimov and ‘The Texas Machine’. Like it or not, Madrimov is a teak-tough night for absolutely anyone at the weight.

But alas, this fight with Canelo is not at the weight. It is at a weight 14 entire pounds above. I’ve already measured discrepancies in microwaves so far in this piece, but 14lbs has to be at least a toaster? A budget brand sandwich maker? 

Nevertheless, this jump is not unprecedented. Just ask, I don’t know, Canelo? The Mexican reigned as WBC, WBA and The Ring champion at 154lbs back in the early 2010s. Admittedly, the fact this fell during his early 20s meant his later growth into the super middleweight mark was more conducive than Crawford attempting it at nearly 38.

But Canelo is not the only one to rule over both divisions. ‘Sugar’ Ray Leonard held titles at both weights, along with welterweight, middleweight and even light heavyweight (albeit with that title won at an identical 168lb catchweight to the super middleweight limit). 

Tommy Hearn, arguably Leonard’s greatest rival, was the inaugural WBO super middleweight ruler, having held the WBC and The Ring super welterweight straps previously. Australian firebrand Anthony Mundine held versions of the WBA crown at both super welterweight and super middleweight.

There are caveats here, it has to be said. Firstly, none of the above fighters moved directly from super welterweight to super middleweight. Secondly, there is not a boxer among those mentioned whose first fight up at 168lbs was against someone as good as Canelo.

Two men have beaten Alvarez in a pro career that spans 67 fights and 20 years. Mayweather, who dismantled the game but raw Mexican, who was 23 at the time. The lessons learned in that setback saw Canelo rule the sport for almost a decade, until current undisputed light heavyweight champion Dmitry Bivol beat him well over the distance in 2022.

Since then, Alvarez is 6-0. He has retained or regained all four super middleweight belts, depending on the machinations of the IBF at any particular point. But the spark is waning for many fans. Gennady Golovkin, John Ryder, Edgar Berlanga, Jaime Munguia, Jermell Charlo and William Scull all inspired varying levels of apathy. 

When you hear that a legendary boxer has had six consecutive opponents scoffed at, your initial thought is that he might just have a  fickle fanbase. But the facts are these. Out of those six, two retired within six months of fighting the Mexican, two have lost in subsequent fights and one combined with Canelo to break the record for the least punches thrown in a 12-round fight since records began. This is not the man on the street demanding too much. This is a great fighter easing into his armchair against a dwindling quality of opponent.