KELLY PAVLIK VS SERGIO MARTINEZ

There will be an intriguing contrast of styles in Saturday’s middleweight title fight on HBO, with champion Kelly Pavlik bringing power and pressure while Argentinean southpaw Sergio Martinez will rely on speed and slick skills.

Pavlik, 28, showed he can overcome a faster boxer in his two wins over Jermain Taylor but I think he is going to have serious problems with the elusiveness and rapid reactions of Martinez, who now trains at Oxnard, CA.

Something has been missing from Pavlik in his last couple of fights, as if the pasting he took from Bernard Hopkins drained some of his life force. It took Pavlik nine rounds of attrition to grind down Marco Antonio Rubio, while in his last fight he seemed to get hit far too often and easily in his fifth-round win over the outgunned Miguel Espino.

Martinez, 35, is the older fighter but he has a fresh look. The challenger is seen as the smaller man, but while Martinez turned professional as a welterweight and is a former junior middleweight champion he looked strong and ripped when coming in at 159 1/2 pounds (the same weight as Pavlik) at Friday’s weigh-in.

In his last fight, his first as a middleweight, Martinez proved very competitive when coming in as a substitute for Pavlik against Paul Williams. He dropped Williams heavily in the first round after getting floored himself and he was fighting strongly at the end, winning both the 10th and 11th rounds on two judges’ cards. What cost Martinez dearly was his fade in the middle rounds, in which Williams did some of his most consistent scoring.

Martinez has always been a confident type of fighter but the fight with Williams should have boosted his self-belief to a new level. Williams was favoured by the oddsmakers to beat Pavlik, but Martinez almost won despite the absurdly wide scoring by one of the judges.

Pavlik’s punching power has to be respected but a fighter can’t hurt his opponent if he can’t hit him, and Martinez, with his constant movement, often with hands low, isn’t easy to get lined up for big, clean punches.

Williams was able to build up points against Martinez with a high volume of punches, but he was getting nailed by hard shots. Pavlik is able to maintain a high punch output but he is also likely to get hit.

Pavlik is the puncher in the fight but Martinez has enough authority on his blows to get respect. I can see the sort of fight developing in which Martinez gets in with sharp shots and has Pavlik missing in the early rounds, but keeping it up for 12 rounds will be the tricky part. I believe Martinez can do it, though. I think he has the speed, savvy and southpaw style to frustrate Pavlik and outscore him, and the toughness to stand up to Pavlik’s heavy right hands — as long as he doesn’t have to take too many of them. I’m going with Martinez to pull off the upset with a points win, perhaps after having to survive some rocky rounds.