Fannon paid for the Canelo Alvarez vs Christian Mbilli card out of his own pocket, and his review opens like an obituary: Terence Crawford ruined Canelo’s career. What he watched in Saudi Arabia, he says, was a shell of the former Canelo — one of the last dances of a long career, and not a good one. The event gets no mercy either: a terrible, lacklustre, plastic card with no real energy, celebrations that felt contrived. The one exception is Jaime Munguia, whose fight brought about a round of the action the night was sold on.
Mbilli does not escape the review. He did not lay down, Fannon says, but he never really tried either — no adjustments, no push to brawl, no go-out-on-his-shield moment from a challenger who was supposed to be fighting for glory. He looked, to Fannon, like a man there for a paycheck, and Canelo looked like a man there for one too. A new WBC belt does not change that picture. Mill City saluted the Halloween win and Mbilli’s effort on the same night — Fannon watched the same twelve rounds and saw two men going through the motions of a coronation nobody in the building believed in.
So what is left? After the fight, Fannon says, Canelo was talking about what he really wants: the Crawford fight. Fannon’s verdict is that it is pretty much the only fight left in Canelo’s career — more title collecting at 168 does not move him, because Canelo is not that level of fighter anymore, and the names behind Mbilli, a Lester Martinez or a Janibek Alimkhanuly moving up, carry no story anybody is asking for. His generation has left the room. And Crawford knows it. Crawford sits in the catbird seat, happy, in Fannon’s telling, to let Canelo sit on that loss and struggle for opponents and motivation — and if Canelo wants the rematch, he will have to give up the money, pay Crawford, at the very least split it down the middle. Fannon, no Crawford business apologist, says he hopes Bud takes it, for a whole lot of money.
Our take: Fannon frames it as karma, and the frame fits his own history lesson — a champion who, in his telling, would not rematch Austin Trout or Erislandy Lara and never ran it back with Dmitry Bivol now needs a rematch more than anything in the sport, from the one man with no reason to grant it cheap. Canelo put all four belts on the line against Crawford and lost them. The price of asking twice is paying the man who beat you like he beat you. That is not desperation. That is the market, finally working the other way.
Video credit: Fannon International Boxing Channel.
