He needs to keep close distance but keep a safe distance from Sergio's reach, but you are wrong on the pressure Sergio has no clinch game at all and sice his reach is so long he can only throw jabs and straights, which doesn't lends itself to clinch fighting which is why Sergio turned his back and ran at times from Chavez who landed like 46% of his shots with his gun in the holster damn near all night
Cotto needs to be patient the 1st four rounds and wait for Sergio to take his usual nap, I expect him to overwhelm the old man who looked visibly slower and shot his last 2 matches
Dude, you gotta formulate strategies based on the strengths of your fighters. Yeah Sergio has a garbage inside game, but Cotto will be hard pressed to be the one to exploit it since he's the smaller less physical man. Yeah he handled Delvin Rodriguez on the inside, but he ain't even half the fighter Trout is let alone Sergio.
Martinez has two glaring weaknesses. His lack of inside game and his inability to avoid good jabbing and step in jabs.
Cotto doesn't have all the necessary attributes to exploit both of those flaws, but he does have what's needed to expose one of them which is the jab.
You can't give Cotto a gameplan that he's not built to execute and that's basically what you doing with all this pressure/inside fighting shyt. That's no better than nikkas saying they gonna use the Castillo approach when fighting Floyd, but aren't good at cutting off the ring, selling out to the body, pressuring, and basically having the attributes to make it work.