Would Clottey have beaten Pacquiao if he threw 1200 punches like him?

By Boxing News - 03/24/2010 - Comments

Image: Would Clottey have beaten Pacquiao if he threw 1200 punches like him?By Esteban Garduno: Manny Pacquiao ended up throwing more than 1200 total punches in defeating former International Boxing Federation welterweight champion Joshua Clottey by a one-sided 12 round unanimous decision on March 13th at the Cowboys Stadium. What was lost in the win was the accuracy, the power and the way that Clottey was able to badly mark up Pacquiao’s face with his shots, despite the fact that Clottey only threw one-third of the amount of punches that Pacquiao threw in the fight.

Clottey threw just over 400 punches during the entire fight, landing with a better percentage than Pacquiao. With the way that Clottey had Pacquiao’s face reddened from his shots, you have to wonder what would have been the end result had Clottey thrown the exact same amount of shots as Pacquiao. I’d like to think that Pacquiao would rise up to the occasion and still win the fight, but I have my doubts that he would.

Actually, I don’t know if Pacquiao would be still standing if Clottey threw another 800 punches. Can you imagine what Pacquiao’s face would look like if Clottey threw that many more punches? Heck, Pacquiao looked like he’d survived a war as it is with Clottey throwing only 400+ punches. If Clottey threw another eight hundred, I have a feeling that they would have been scooping Pacquiao up off the canvas and bringing him to a nearby hospital.

I have a feeling that if Pacquiao started taking a really bad beating from Clottey, Freddie Roach, Pacquiao’s faithful trainer, would do the wise thing and pull the plug on the fight to save Pacquiao from taking too much of a beating.

If you saw how much more powerful Clottey’s shots seemed to me and how they were connecting so cleanly, like a laser beam on that night, I think things would have ended badly for Pacquiao if Clottey had thrown as many punches as he did. Clottey was lifting Pacquiao’s head up again and again with uppercuts, and Pacquiao seemed to have no idea how to block these shots.

I didn’t see any real defense from Pacquiao in the fight. He just stood there in front of Clottey, throwing punch after punch at Clottey’s gloves. I think Pacquiao did an admirable job of landing to the gloves, but I didn’t see much in the way of punch placement from him. But if Clottey had thrown another 800 punches in that fight, I really think Pacquiao would have suffered the beating of his life. This is why I think it’s a really bad idea for Pacquiao to be ever pitted against Antonio Margarito and Paul Williams.

Both of these fighters, while not as powerful as Clottey, routinely throw 1200 punches per fight. If Pacquiao goes up against one of them with his nearly nonexistent defense, I think he’s going to get beaten to a pulp. That’s just how it is. You have to have some defensive ability to beat those guys. Shane Mosley, a talented fighter, was able to beat Margarito by using an in and out attack along with a lot of clinching.

Margarito can’t be beaten by an in and out attack alone. It would require for Pacquiao to clinch frequently, and I’ve never seen him do that before except on occasions where he’s been badly hurt. Pacquiao seems to have too much pride to clinch. That might be his undoing in a fight against Margarito. Against Paul Williams, it wouldn’t matter what Pacquiao did. I think he’d lose and lose badly. Williams can fight really well on the inside, and he’d likely eat Pacquiao up with uppercuts if Pacquiao tried to crowd him.



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