By Chris Williams: Adrien Broner, the clone of Floyd Mayweather Jr., wasn’t surprised at watching replays of Manny Pacquiao get knocked out by Juan Manuel Marquez recently. Broner notes that Pacquiao has never had any defense for a right hand and has spent his career getting hit with those kinds of punches.
Speaking with fighthype.com, Broner said “His name is Plankuiao [Pacquiao]. Plankuiao never got out of the way of a right hand. He always gets hit with a right hand.”
That is true. Pacquiao has always been wide open to those punches, especially in his fights against Marquez. If you watch all four of their fights you’ll notice that Marquez has always been able to sail a right hand through Pacquiao’s open guard to nail him with head and body shots. For some reason Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach hasn’t been able to fix that part of Pacquiao’s game even after all these years with him.
It’s kind of a tragedy because that’s the one area where Pacquiao could have been improved dramatically had Roach come up with a fix for. I know Roach has spent a lot of time on working on Pacquiao’s offense, but his defense really should have been just as much of a focus because it’s an area where he could have made dramatic improvements.
We’re starting to see Pacquiao’s problems now more and more on defense now that he’s getting up there in age at 34. You don’t want to get a fighter that hasn’t built up good skills in this area at his age, because when the speed and legs start to go then there’s nothing to keep the fighter from getting nailed 24/7 because the defense isn’t there.
We’ve seen that with the speedy Roy Jones Jr. when he started to age, and now we’re seeing it with Pacquiao. He might on his way to becoming another Roy Jones Jr. in the sense that he could start getting knocked out a lot like Jones Jr.
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