(Photo credit: Esther Lin/Showtime) By Chris Williams: Floyd Mayweather Jr has calmly listened to both Manny Pacquiao and his trainer Freddie Roach trash talk him lately in their attempts at getting into his head and intimidate him, and he seemingly isn’t worried at all. Mayweather points out that he’s gotten the better of the 55-year-old Roach in the past, and he feels he’s going to have no problems doing it again when he and Pacquiao fight on May 2nd in Las Vegas, Nevada.
It’ll be business as usual when he gets Pacquiao in the ring at the MGM Grand, and Mayweather intends on turning the 36-year-old Filipino fighter into just another statistic for him.
“I faced Freddie Roach before in the past, and of course I was victorious,” Mayweather said via gmanetwork.com’s Connie Sison. “He’s a good trainer.”
Roach has been wanting to get the better of Mayweather for ages now, but he just hasn’t had the luck of doing that. Now he’s got an aging fighter in Pacquiao and an old game plan that’s now six years old and covered with a lot of dust and cobwebs due to Roach coming up with the plan in 2009.
While Roach has been quick to say that he’s working on a new game plan, Pacquiao has already spilled the beans by saying it’s the same plan that Roach came up with six years ago. It’s really not much of a plan though, because it’s designed on how Pacquiao has always fought since the day he walked into Roach’s Wildcard Gym many years ago.
Roach is basically just going to take Pacquiao off his leash and have him attack Mayweather nonstop on May 2nd and hope for the best. It’s a style that Mayweather has always done well against during his career, and I suspect he’ll do extremely well against it in this fight.
There is no specific plan though, and that’s the hilarious part of it. Roach has always talked about having a great plan for Pacquiao to use against Mayweather, but he’s just going to have fight like he did before he even started training with Roach.
“He’s going to be in trouble. He’ll fall right into our power and he’ll get knocked out,” said Roach.
There are some welterweights in the division that have excellent punching power like Keith Thurman, Kell Brook and Marcos Maidana, but I think it’s academic at this point that Pacquiao isn’t one of them. His power seems to have left him many moons ago back in 2009. He’s no longer knocking guys out, and he’s not even coming close to knocking anyone out.
This is why it’s confusing that Roach keeps talking about Pacquiao as if he’s still a knockout artist. The fact is Pacquiao hasn’t knocked anyone out in six years, and when you have a dry spell like that, it kind of tells you a little something about where Pacquiao is in the power department.
Instead of Roach bragging about how Pacquiao is going to hurt Mayweather with his power and knock him out, Roach should be warning Mayweather that Pacquiao will outwork him and overwhelm him with punches. I think there’s a possibility that Pacquiao can do that if Mayweather stands right in front of him for the full 12 round fight instead of him using movement.
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