By Manuel Perez: I’ve gone over all the variables on this Saturday night’s fight between Ricky Hatton (45-1, 32 KOs) and Manny Pacquiao (48-3-2, 36 KOs) at the MGM Grand, in Las Vegas, Nevada, and I can’t see how Hatton can lose this fight. Hatton has the size, power and boxing skills advantage in this fight, whereas Pacquiao only has the speed working for him. This is Hatton’s fight as long as he doesn’t lose his head and get mixed up in a pointless war with Pacquiao.
If that happens, then I can see Pacquiao winning the fight. Brawling is what Pacquiao specializes in and where he generally has the advantage over his opponents because of his hand speed and ability to get in quickly with lunging attacks.
However, tough Mexican fighters Juan Manuel Marquez and Erik Morales set the blueprint on how to beat Pacquiao by boxing him rather than trading shots. In the fights against Morales and Marquez, Pacquiao showed that he’s a pretty average fighter when the bout is slowed down to a crawl.
Pacquiao doesn’t react well when his opponent becomes technical and starts to peck away at him with jabs and selective combinations. If you look at Pacquiao’s recent fight with Marquez in 2008, Pacquiao did poorly when Marquez stayed on the outside using his jab.
When Marquez would come in and land two or three shots, Pacquiao looked off balance and not skilled at dealing with the brief attacks. Throughout his boxing career, Pacquiao has become accustomed to facing opponents that either stay directly in front of him or those that foolishly try to attack him for prolonged periods of time.
Against those types of fighters, Pacquiao does well against due to his faster hand speed. However, when Pacquiao is forced to fight an opponent that is fighting on the outside with brief flurries, Pacquiao is very beatable. In both fights against Marquez, Pacquiao was unable to do much beyond the winning a round here and there, mainly because Marquez refused to get caught up in a war with him.
Pacquiao fights best when things are out of control with both fighters flailing away at each other. You could say that Pacquiao is more of a school ground fighter, who does best when skills are thrown out the window as both fighters throw endless punches at each other.
Pacquiao gets the better of his opponents in these cases not because he has a better chin or that his power is all that better, but because he has the better hand speed. Since his speed is better, Pacquiao’s punches often arrive before his opponent’s shots.
This enables him to win many of the wild exchanges that he gets into with his opponent. This is why it’s important to stay in control when fighting a crude fighter like Pacquiao, because if you get in the trench with him and try to beat him at his own game, you’re just going to get muddy like him.
This is why it’s imperative that Hatton resist his brawling instincts in this fight and focus exclusively on using his new skills taught to him by trainer Floyd Mayweather Sr. You don’t brawl with a brawler, the saying goes. If Hatton wants to get out on top in this fight, he needs to use his jab and pick his spots to throw combinations.
Once he has Pacquiao cut up and hurt, then I have no problem with Hatton teeing off on Pacquiao with some combinations. Pacquiao doesn’t seem to fight well when he’s cut and seems to get cautious and overly concerned with the cut. Once Hatton has Pacquiao cut, he needs to put the fight into overdrive and finish Pacquiao off.
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