Turki Alalshikh spent the Canelo Alvarez vs Christian Mbilli fight talking to his buddy, and the backlash found him fast. AKHi TV’s read is blunter than the backlash: Turki paid for a Mexican war and got Tom and Jerry instead. In the host’s eyes the fight was not even close — Canelo won it clean, Mbilli was afraid to come in, hesitated to fight to win, and settled into fighting to survive, happy just to be in there. Action-wise and skill-wise, the host calls it one of the best performances of Canelo’s career: combinations, movement, defence, a man changing his opponent’s mind in real time.
That is exactly the problem, by Turki’s own standard. Turki calls movement Tom and Jerry, the host says, and this was supposed to be a Mexican war with a knockout at the end of it. Canelo chose to be Ali that night. The host is fair about one thing: Turki always does this. Half the time he is on his phone or looking around while a fight is on, and the Canelo fight was no exception — except, in Turki’s eyes, there was not much worth looking at. So the question the video keeps asking is not really about Turki. It is about everybody else who suddenly lost the Tom and Jerry vocabulary the moment Canelo was the one doing the moving.
Because the label was ready enough when it was Terence Crawford moving up weight divisions to face Canelo — a man the host notes was knocking everybody out, who still stood in the pocket when he got there. It was ready when it was Floyd Mayweather, who the host says moved less against Canelo than Canelo moved against Mbilli and still got called a runner. The host’s wider charge, and it is his charge, is that Golden Boy long ago admitted Canelo had to be kept away from the Black American style because that style is his kryptonite — Floyd, Lara, Bivol and Crawford are the names he lays on the table. And if a Mexican war was truly the order, the war had a name: David Benavidez, the Mexican Monster. Canelo never took that fight.
Our take: strip the entertainment argument down and the host lands on the same test this site always lands on. Crawford got called Ali style as an insult and Canelo gets called Ali style as praise — same feet, different flag. Canelo boxed beautifully against Mbilli. Nobody gets to call that running when Crawford does it and genius when Canelo does it. Keep the same energy, or drop the label for good.
Video credit: AKHi TV.
