Hatton Looking to Put Immediate Pressure On Pacquiao

By Boxing News - 03/25/2009 - Comments

hatton442366By Manuel Perez: Former light welterweight and welterweight champion Ricky Hatton is counting on his size, power and speed to be an important factor in his May 2nd bout with Manny Pacquiao in Las Vegas, Nevada. Hatton plans to jump all over Pacquiao immediately in their bout and try to overpower him in the 1st round. “Attack, attack and attack again,” is Hatton’s plan for Pacquiao. That’s nothing new with him, because Hatton pretty much fights this way all the time regardless of whom he’s fighting.

In the case of Floyd Mayweather Jr., Hatton’s only loss of his career, his pressure didn’t work because Mayweather was able to easily pick off Hatton as he would come forward looking to land his big hooks. In a new twist, Hatton plans on using speed his speed against Pacquiao.

Apparently, Hatton has been working a great deal on improving his hand speed, hoping to match Pacquiao’s blazing fast hands. However, that seems more like a pipe dream for Hatton than reality, because Hatton likely won’t be any faster than he is now by fight time on May 2nd.

If anything, Hatton might be a couple of degrees slower, because like always, he had to take off a lot of extra tonnage in training for this fight and each time a person does that, there is a certain amount of physical deterioration that occurs.

If Hatton’s lucky, he’ll be as fast as he was against Paulie Malignaggi in his last fight. That’s not fast, but it might be enough to compete with Pacquiao. Instead of focusing on speed, Hatton needs to be concentrating on his power, because his size and power are going to be important factors in this bout. If Hatton can come into the fight weighing as minimum of 160 to 165, he’ll do well but only if that’s solid muscle and not the flab.

He can’t make the same mistake that Oscar De La Hoya did by coming into the fight weighing less than 147, and not gaining any weight after the weigh in. Hatton needs to make sure he’s the bigger man, so that he can use that extra size to bull around the smaller Pacquiao.

Manny will probably strain to come in at 140, but won’t be gaining any weight after the weight in because he’s pushing himself just to get up to 140. However, Hatton is a natural 140 pounder and its easy for him to make 140 or slightly higher.

You can ignore Pacquiao’s win over De La Hoya in predicting how Hatton will do against Pacquiao, because De La Hoya shouldn’t have even taken the fight because he was a physical wreck at the time of the fight. Hatton will be coming in at a solid 140-160, and it won’t be hard for him to make then weight like it was for De La Hoya.

Hatton figures that Pacquiao will try to use his boxing skills to fight rather than go right after Hatton from the first round on like Manny typically does with his opponents. Hatton’s betting that this doesn’t work, saying that this may have worked against and old and weight drained De La Hoya, but it won’t work with him.



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