By Chris Williams: Manny Pacquiao’s strength and conditioning coach Alex Ariza is practically tripping over himself in complimenting Pacquiao’s worth ethic as he gets ready for his June 9th bout against Tim Bradley.

Ariza said “[Pacquiao] just keeps pushing and pushing and pushing. That’s Manny Pacquiao. [He] is right now at his peak, but we’ve got toe slow him down.”

There it is – Ariza forming what could be an excuse for when and if Pacquiao fails to impress against Bradley. We’ll have the old, ‘He peaked too soon’ excuse coming down the pike if Pacquiao looks terrible again like in his last fight. I sure hope Ariza and Freddie Roach don’t pull that age old excuse out of their hats come June 9th.

And I don’t want to hear the excuses about Pacquiao having family problems that messed up his training. Supposedly the family problems are behind him, but you never know when someones looking for a handy excuse to explain away a bad performance from Pacquiao. I guess it’s easy to blame it on some kind of external factor rather than taking responsibility and saying ‘I didn’t teach him enough things to help him beat Bradley.’

That’s what I’d like to hear. A trainer and strength trainer are are like the captains of a ship, and they’re expected to go down with that ship if things go wrong. You don’t want to see a captain blaming the waves for his own bad steering of the ship. When you see a captain doing those kinds of things, it’s time to relieve them of command and put them out to pasture. If Pacquiao looks horrible again, he needs to dump Roach and Ariza and start from scratch with new trainers.

It’s better to do that than to just get pounded on by these younger fighters without improving. Of course, if Pacquiao is getting old, which is what I think could be the problem, then I guess he can hang on to Roach and Ariza until the bitter end. Personally, I would dump them anyway and get some new blood in there.