By Chris Williams: With his performances going downhill with each fight in the past year, Manny Pacquiao says he plans on staying in the Los Angeles area to train there for his entire training camp to get ready for his December 8th fight against Juan Manuel Marquez rather than splitting the camp in two halves with the first part in the Philippines and then second in Los Angeles at the Wildcard Gym belonging to his trainer Freddie Roach.

Pacquiao said to ESPN “I realize I need to get back to the aggressiveness I had before. I need that aggressiveness for this fight [Marquez] and to focus on this training camp. That’s why I decided to train here in Hollywood [Los Angeles] for this fight. For the sake of this fight I want to give a good fight to end the doubt for the fans.”

To be sure, it’s got to be a major distraction for Pacquiao when he’s training in his native Philippines due to all of the pressures associated with his super stardom over there. He’s got tons of fans and important people all vying for his time. It doesn’t stop when he’s in training camp, and it’s something that has been frustrating for his trainer Freddie Roach to have to deal with at times.

I don’t see how there will be much difference in Pacquiao’s performance with him training the entire time in Los Angeles. I think he’s simply getting older and his body can’t do the things that he once did. Do I think Pacquiao can get in better shape if he pushes himself all out during his sparring sessions? Yes. But I don’t think Pacquiao is going to push himself to the limit during the sparring sessions, because I’ve seen too many of them and it looks like he takes it easy on many of them rather than looking to smash them. Maybe Pacquiao gets close to them and doesn’t want to beat them up the way he needs to in order to get his conditioning to where it needs to be to beat a fighter like Marquez. But I don’t see Pacquiao changing for this camp.

Pacquiao needs to go all out during his sparring in order to get his conditioning to the point where he can fight hard for three minutes of every round like he once could, but I don’t think he’ll do it. Pacquiao will likely take it easy on his sparring mates and go half speed. Roach can fix this if he rotates sparring partners frequently, but that’s a lot of work having to look constantly for new sparring partners that are good enough to give Pacquiao rounds.