Roach: I won’t be surprised if Pacquiao wins every round against Mayweather

By Boxing News - 04/27/2015 - Comments

roach56By Chris Williams: With five days left for the May 2nd mega-fight on Saturday, Freddie Roach, the trainer of WBO welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao, is very confident about the Filipino star’s fight on Saturday night against Floyd Mayweather Jr. at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Roach thinks the fight will either be a knockout or a one-sided 12 round decision victory for Pacquiao in which he wins every round of the fight. Roach’s confidence or should I say overconfidence could lead to him and Pacquiao being the butt of a lot of jokes if Mayweather ends up winning this fight by a one-sided margin.

When looking at Pacquiao’s last five fights in which he’s lost two of them, it would seem that he’s not as good as Roach thinks he is. On paper, Pacquiao would appear to be over-matched in this fight, and Roach’s overconfidence makes him seem out of touch with reality. Luckily for Roach this is just a boxing match and not a case of him working as the captain of a sailing ship sailing through a rocky shoreline because things could go very wrong for Pacquiao on Saturday and Roach seems mentally oblivious to them all.

“So while he won’t go mad for the knock-out, it could come from Manny’s left. If not I won’t be surprised if he wins every round. Pitches a shutout,” Roach said via the Dailymail.co.uk. “Either way, Floyd doesn’t have the power to hurt him.”

If Pacquiao couldn’t even pitch a shutout against Tim Bradley last year, who has been his toughest fight in the past couple of years, it’s unrealistic to assume that Pacquiao will be able to dominate an arguably far better fighter than Bradley in Mayweather.

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Pacquiao defeated Bradley by the scores of 116-112, 118-110 and 116-112. Other than oddball score of 118-110, Pacquiao barely beat Bradley. If Pacquiao couldn’t even dominate a limited fighter like Bradley, then how is he going to be able to beat a guy that is much better than him in Mayweather?

The problem that Roach and Pacquiao have, besides Roach’s overconfidence, is that they’ve spent so much time on a game plan that Roach has designed that he feels is going to work 100 percent against Mayweather. When you invest so much belief in one game plan working for a fight it can leave your fighter totally lost when that game place is quickly neutralized in the course of a battle. In this case, Roach’s overconfidence could leave Pacquiao down a one-way street with traffic heading his way.

I don’t know that Roach sees things in a realistic way at this point. His unshakeable confidence is scary and it would make me wary of wanting to be trained by him because the last thing you need is a trainer who doesn’t have his feet on the ground. To be sure, Pacquiao is a decent fighter, but he also has been matched softly by his promoter Bob Arum ever since he was beaten by Juan Manuel Marquez in 2012 in my opinion. The guys that Arum has matched Pacquiao against, Brandon Rios, Tim Bradley and Chris Algieri, are more like B level fighters and not the top level of the division. If you put those fighters in with the best guys like Mayweather, Keith Thurman, Kell Brook or Amir Khan, I suspect they’ll lose and lose worse than they did against Pacquiao. Those victories seem to have give Roach a warped view of how good Pacquiao is. Instead of him realizing that Arum backed Pacquiao off from the best fighters and put him in with remedial competition to get his confidence back, Roach seems to think Pacquiao is now unbeatable and that’s very troubling because he’s clearly not.



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