Hunter picks Marquez to beat Pacquiao

By Boxing News - 12/04/2012 - Comments

Image: Hunter picks Marquez to beat PacquiaoBy Chris Williams: Oakland based trainer Virgil Hunter, who helped make WBA/WBC super middleweight champion Andre Ward the fighter he is today, is going with Juan Manuel Marquez to top Manny Pacquiao this Saturday night in their huge mega fight in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Hunter sees Marquez as being the wrong fight for Pacquiao at this stage in his career, and he thinks Marquez will be even better now that he’s working once again with his strength and conditioning coach Angel Hernandez.

Hunter said to RingTV “I’m going to go with Juan Manuel Marquez on a tight, split decision…the fourth fight is maybe something that Manny Pacquiao didn’t need with Marquez.”

Hunter sees Marquez taking the fight to Pacquiao this time and looking to knock him out as opposed to just boxing him like he did in the three previous fights. With Marquez’s new strength, he’s become a harder puncher and I think that’s going to be really tough on Pacquiao now because he doesn’t move as much as he used to. He’s not able to get out of the way of big shots like he did when he first moved up to welterweight because his legs look really heavy now. Pacquiao has faced some big punchers like Antonio Margarito and Miguel Cotto at welterweight, but he didn’t get hit much in those fights because he was able to use his legs to get out of the way of shots. But now Pacquiao isn’t able to avoid punches and he’s going to get hit a lot by Marquez on Saturday.

I think we could see that Pacquiao really can’t take punishment like the kind he’s been dishing out all these years. Once a fighter loses his legs, it’s a whole new proposition and I think Pacquiao is going to be like a butterfly without wings against Marquez in this fight.

This is a really hard fight for Pacquiao at this point in his career. Marquez is seems to be getting stronger with his strength coach Hernandez, whereas Pacquiao has been looking tired and old recently. He’s not looked good in his last four fights. You can say Pacquiao deserved to get a victory in his last fight against Tim Bradley, but Pacquiao didn’t look good in that fight. He looked like a tired old fighter who was facing a guy with no power and who had lost his speed with too much strength training. Bradley looked slow in that fight.



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