By William Mackay: Although many boxing fans and experts have pretty much written Ricky Hatton off as finished as a fighter, has anyone took the time to contemplate whether Hatton’s losses to Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather Jr. were more of an aberration rather than a sign that Hatton is shot as a fighter?

Look at it this way, Hatton is cruising along in his career, building up an impressive 43-0 record and then he runs into a fighter that has a game plan that is perfect at stopping Hatton’s style. Hatton then fights on, beating Juan Lazcano and Paulie Malignaggi, and in the meantime also hires a new trainer Floyd Mayweather Sr. to teach him a new style of fighting.

And then Hatton has a problem with sticking to the new style in his next fight with Pacquiao and almost immediately gets knocked out. Instead of seeing it as a failure to follow directions by his new trainer and implement what was taught to him, many of the so-called boxing experts and fans are ready to right Hatton off as having a diminished ability to take a punch and that he’s washed up as a fighter.

I can almost guarantee you that if Hatton had fought Mayweather and Pacquiao at any stretch of his career the same results would have occurred if Hatton had been using his old style of fighting against them. That doesn’t mean that Hatton was a shot fighter or that his old style of fighting was completely useless and ineffective.

What it meant was that he needed to use a different style of fighting for those two guys in order to beat them. Muhammad Ali knew that he couldn’t rush out and try to trade shots with George Foreman in their fight. Instead, he came up with a plan to stay on the ropes and tire Foreman out by making him expend energy by throwing a lot of punches.

The difference here is that Ali came up with a plan ahead of time and stuck to and didn’t deviate from it at any time in the fight. The same goes for Pacquiao. He came up with a plan to use against Hatton and carried it out to the letter.

It was pretty much the same thing that Pacquiao has been doing since the second Erik Morales fight where Pacquiao is throwing more right hooks to catch his opponents as they’re coming in. However, to listen to Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach you’d think that this was something that was completely new.

But the important thing is Pacquiao stuck to a plan and it worked well for him. Hatton didn’t follow any plan other than his old style of fighting, which gave Hatton little chance of beating a fighter like Pacquiao. Again, Hatton could beat most fighters with his old style of fighting but for a fighter like Pacquiao, Hatton would need to have a different way of fighting if he wanted to come out the winner.

That doesn’t mean that Hatton is a shot fighter or that he can’t take a big punch anymore, because I’m fairly certain he can. Hatton just made the mistake of rushing blindly in against a fighter with blazing fast hand speed and with a great right hook.

It was the same case with Vic Darchinyan when he tried to rush in against southpaw Nonito Donaire and was nailed with a right hook on the way in and knocked out. No one said that Darchinyan was shot, even though he was clearly knocked out in the fight.

It doesn’t matter if Hatton was knocked clean out, because he never even saw the punch because he wasn’t expecting it and he was having problems adjusting to Pacquiao’s speed and southpaw style. Few light welterweights have hand speed anywhere close to that of Pacquiao, and the ones that aren’t southpaws.