Malignaggi: Pacquiao will need to make adjustments to beat Mayweather

By Boxing News - 03/01/2015 - Comments

pac73729999By Chris Williams: Manny Pacquiao isn’t known for being the type of fighter who makes a lot of adjustments to outsmart his opponents. He’s basically the same fighter every time out, which is why he’s struggled so badly against guys like Juan Manuel Marquez.

For that reason former two division world champion Paulie Malignaggi thinks Pacquiao is going to be in deep, deep trouble on 5/2 when he gets inside the ring with Floyd Mayweather Jr in their huge money mega-fight at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.

“I guess he [Pacquiao] has to make some kind of adjustments that he’s never done before,” Malignaggi said via esnewsreporting.com in explaining what Pacquiao has to do in order to beat Mayweather on May 2nd. “But what I’ve seen of Pacquiao’s fights, I don’t see him being very adaptive. You hope Pacquiao can be a little more adaptive. I don’t see a lot of creativity in Pacquiao’s style. You hope he can be creative and you hope he can bring aggression, because then you’ll get a good fight out of him,” Malignaggi said.

Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach says that he’s working on a game plan for Pacquiao to defeat, but Roach also said the same thing for Pacquiao’s other fights in the past. What we see instead is Pacquiao always fighting with the same exact style that he’s always done in the past.

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It’s possible that Roach is giving Pacquiao different game plans, but that the Filipino star isn’t able or willing to grasp what he’s being trained to do.

There’s old saying that you can’t teach old dogs new tricks, and it’s possible that Pacquiao has gotten too up there in age for him to be able to make any kind changes to his fighting style, even changes that are short term. In other words, Pacquiao appears to be someone stuck in his way and unable to change from the fighter that Roach molded him into many years ago.

There’s also questions whether Roach really made any changes at all in Pacquiao’s original fighting style. If you look at Pacquiao’s earliest fights, his fighting style back then was basically the same as it is now. The only difference is that Pacquiao was faster back then, and he wasn’t using his right hand like he is now.

So Roach’s main and perhaps only contribution to his many years as Pacquiao’s trainer was teaching him how to use his right hand. As far as all the game plans that Roach has been giving Pacquiao fight after fight, they’ve not been used.

Getting Pacquiao to try something different in this fight might be about as easy as dragging someone to the dentist for a root canal procedure. I don’t see Pacquiao being able to do anything different in this fight from what he’s done in the past, and that means he’s going to be in trouble when he gets inside the ring with Mayweather.

The problem that Pacquiao has, beside his fighting style not being an effective one for the task at hand, is that Mayweather already knows Pacquiao’s fighting style from having watched his past fights.



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