(Photo credit: Chris Farina/Tom Rank) By Chris Williams: WBO welterweight champion Tim Bradley (31-0, 12 KO’s) is still more than a little mystified by the fact that hes the underdog against Manny Pacquiao (55-5-2, 38 KO’s) for their upcoming April 12th fight. Bradley feels that Pacquiao should be the underdog considering that he was recently knocked out cold by Juan Manuel Marquez in 2012. This is the same Marquez that Bradley easily beat by a 12 round decision last October.
Bradley thinks it’s funny how fans select Pacquiao to beat him when they should be backing him in this fight.
“He just got knocked out by Marquez, and I beat Marquez and I am the underdog?” Bradley said to thaboxingvoice. “It’s hilarious to me and I’m like ‘are you guys kidding me?'”
Bradley will get a second shot to prove that he’s better than Pacquiao, and there probably won’t be any controversy this time. Either way, one of them is likely going to win convincingly enough to satisfy fans this time.
I originally thought that Pacquiao would win this fight, but the more and more I hear from him about how he’s looking to be aggressive like he was in his youth, I think we could be seeing a repeat of his knockout loss to Marquez. I thought Pacquiao had learned a big lesson by realizing that he can’t afford to fight in a wreckless manner when he’s in the ring. He’s too old to fight like that now, and his chin has already been badly compromised in his loss to Marquez, and there’s no telling how much damage that KO did to Pacquiao’s ability to take a hard punch.
When you’ve been knocked out the way that Pacquiao was in that fight against Marquez, it’s highly possible that he could suffer additional stoppage losses if he fights like a madman without thought. That’s one of the reasons why Pacquiao should have dumped his trainer Freddie Roach instead of his strength and conditioning trainer Alex Ariza.
It was Roach that was telling Pacquiao to fight aggressively to try and get him back to where he was earlier in his career when he was going into his last fight against Marquez. Roach was telling Pacquiao to try and do the impossible. He wanted him to fight like he did when he was 25-years-old. The problem is that when Pacquiao was 25, he was fighting in the featherweight division against lighter punchers Asking Pacquiao to fight like he used to when he’s now in the welterweight division and 35 was just a crazy thing for Roach to do. For that reason I think he should have been dumped by Pacquiao.
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