By Chris Williams: Manny Pacquiao’s very vocal trainer Freddie Roach believes that it’s a forgone conclusion that Pacquiao will be beating Floyd Mayweather Jr on May 2nd. In fact, Roach is so confident that Pacquiao will win the fight that he’s saying that he’s 100 percent convinced in his mind that Pacquiao will defeat Mayweather when they battle at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.
One of the reasons why Roach thinks Pacquiao will win the fight is due to Roach’s believe that Mayweather can’t move like he used to earlier in his career.
Roach says that Mayweather has lost his legs due to age, and is now forced to stand in the pocket for increasingly long periods of time in his fights. Roach doesn’t see this as something that Mayweather elects to do by choice. Rather, Roach sees him as literally having no other choice but to stand his ground and fight in the pocket against his younger opposition.
“100%. Everyone says [Mayweather’s] changed his style to become more fan-friendly. He doesn’t [care] about the fans. He just can’t move no more,” Roach said via the latimes.com. “Manny has better legs, he’ll be in better shape than Floyd, and he’ll be more motivated.”
I think you can make a good argument that Mayweather has the better legs than Pacquiao. Mayweather doesn’t move as fast as Pacquiao does on his feet, but he also doesn’t tend to cramp up the way that Pacquiao does.
We’ve all heard how Pacquiao’s legs cramp up when he moves a lot, and this in turn forces him to stand still when he would prefer moving around the ring.
If you look at Mayweather’s last fight against Marcos Maidana last September, you’ll notice that Mayweather used a great deal of movement in that fight, and he was able to move for the entire 12 rounds.
If there was something wrong with Mayweather’s legs, then he wouldn’t have been able to move as well during the Maidana rematch.
Roach might be trying to get into Mayweather’s head by talking trash to get him to under-perform on May 2nd. You have to remember that Pacquiao rarely does much trash talking about his opponents.
Instead of Pacquiao trash talking, Roach is the one that does most of the talking, For the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight, you can expect Roach to do even more trash talking than he normally does, because the fight is on a much bigger scale.
Roach needs Mayweather to be as stationary as possible in order to give Pacquiao a chance of winning this fight. If Mayweather uses a lot of movement like he did in the second fight against Maidana, then Pacquiao probably doesn’t have a prayer. This isn’t Chris Algieri, Tim Bradley or Brandon Rios that Pacquiao is fighting. Mayweather knows how to fight on the move, and he’s great at staying on the move for the full 12 rounds.
Mayweather does definitely move a lot less than he used to, but it seems to be more by design than out of necessity. Mayweather wants to entertain the boxing fans and the best way he can do this is by trading with his opponents.
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