By Chris Williams: November 12th will be Manny Pacquiao’s third time and trying to solve the riddle of Juan Manuel Marquez. This time Pacquiao has the WBO welterweight trinket that he’s in possession of and Marquez, now 38, will be trying to relieve Pacquiao of this belt.

Pacquiao’s strength trainer Alex Ariza thinks Pacquiao is going to be seeing this fight as personal due to his struggles with Marquez in their first two fights in 2004 and 2008. Pacquiao looked horrid in both fights and is incredibly lucky that the judges didn’t give him losses in both fights because he sure looked like he lost both. Perhaps for this reason, Pacquiao really sees it as personal now. Marquez is older and smaller now that Pacquiao has blown up with power eating and exercising with the help of Ariza.

Speaking of Ariza, he said this to fighthype.com: “I’d be surprised if Manny didn’t try to knock him out in the first round…I just know how Manny is. If he wants to take you out, he’s gonna take you put.”

I think Ariza is mistaking Pacquiao for some kind of knockout artist, which he isn’t. The last time I checked, Pacquiao hasn’t stopped anyone in over two years, and hasn’t scored an early knockout since he stopped a badly weight drained and fundamentally unsound Ricky Hatton in 2009. That’s a long time ago, and Pacquiao has slowed down since then and is more of a slow plodder.

I suspect he’s going to be getting even fewer knockouts unless they start feeding him more opponents that are coming off a losses and struggling with old age. Pacquiao’s last opponent was 40-year-old Shane Mosley, who Bob Arum had a brilliant idea that he would be a great opponent for Pacquiao to fight to get a nice payday.

Sure enough, the fight did well on PPV, but boxing fans were up in arms for paying a bundle to watch a terrible mismatch on pay per view. I knew it was going to be a mismatch, but casual fans, who don’t have much of a clue about current fighters, mistakenly thought that Mosley was still pretty much in his prime. How wrong they were. Pacquiao got a good payday, boxing fans got angry, and now we’ve got Pacquiao facing a guy that is approaching his 39th birthday in Marquez. The fight is four years too late, and the catchweight of 144 lbs favors Pacquiao. There’s no meeting halfway for the catchweight, it’s definitely one that favors Pacquiao.