By Scott Gilfoid: Bob Shannon, the trainer for Ricky Hatton, says he had problems trying to communicate with Hatton last Saturday night during his fight against Vyacheslav Senchenko in front of 20,000 fans at the Manchester Arena, in Manchester, England.

Shannon told itv.com “He [Hatton] couldn’t give me eye contact in the ring and the noise was that bad when I was trying to get him to work his jab…He lost his concentration probably after the 4th round and was getting caught.”

Oh, so is that why Hatton wasn’t using his jab in the Senchenko fight, because he couldn’t hear Shannon’s instructions? I don’t understand why this wasn’t worked out ahead ahead of time. Wasn’t the jab kind of like the key to this fight? I mean, all you got to do is look at how the pillow-punching Paulie Malignaggi was able to puff up and stop Senchenko with little more jabs last April in Malignaggi’s 9th round stoppage win in Ukraine.

That should have a clue for Hatton in how to beat Senchenko. Now why would Hatton need his trainer Shannon to remind him to throw his jab during the actual fight? I don’t know why but Hatton didn’t use his jab hardly at all in this fight, and instead he fought like he usually does by throwing big power shots, many of which missed unfortunately for him.

With timing and accuracy shot, Hatton needed to turn another weapon such as a jab to regain control over the fight in the 5th when the fight started slipping away from him. However, Hatton didn’t change his game at all and continued to plod forward looking for a big knockout shot. It was all so predicable. I knew it was a matter of time before Hatton got knocked out once he started running out of gas in the 5th and taking punishment.

I would say that his fight should be a good learning tool for Hatton, but I can’t even say that because he chose to retire after the fight instead of looking at areas where he can improve.