Roach: We [Pacquiao] have to win this fight

By Boxing News - 04/08/2015 - Comments

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By Chris Williams: Manny Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach feels that Pacquiao is in a must-win situation with his fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr on May 2nd. Pacquiao has lost plenty of fights during his long 20-year pro career, and he’s had several fights against Juan Manuel Marquez that he arguably should have lost as well.

We’re talking about a fighter who is no stranger to losing. However, Roach thinks the 36-year-old Pacquiao cannot afford to lose to Mayweather Jr in their mega-fight at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. Roach sees a loss for Pacquiao as something that is unacceptable.

Roach doesn’t say why a loss to Mayweather would be any different than what many boxing fans see as four defeats against Juan Manuel Marquez, but to Roach he sees this as a fight that Pacquiao can’t lose.
“I feel we have to win this fight,” Roach said via the Rollingstone.com about the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight. “This is a must-win situation. We don’t want to be second best. Second best no one remembers.”

A good explanation for why Roach doesn’t want Pacquiao to taste defeat against Mayweather is because it would be a big hit on Roach’s career as a trainer. If Pacquiao loses to Mayweather in the biggest fight of his career, then Roach will partly be seen as responsible for the loss because he’s supposedly the mastermind behind Pacquiao’s fighting style, even though Pacquiao fights exactly how he did when he first started training with Roach many years ago.

Boxing fans will still put a lot of the blame on Roach for a Pacquiao loss to Mayweather. A loss for Pacquiao will be bad news for Roach. If you look at the wild way that Pacquiao fought against Marquez in their fourth fight in 2012, you can assign blame to Roach for him not reining Pacquiao in to get him to fight with a little more control. But instead of holding Pacquiao back, Roach seemed to be encouraging him to fight in an aggressive manner against Marquez. The result was Pacquiao getting knocked out in the 6th round by a right hand from Marquez.

If Pacquiao beats Mayweather, it’ll validate Roach as a trainer and make him look like a genius. It doesn’t matter if Pacquiao fights just like he’s always fought even before he started training with Roach. The guy that will get a lot of the credit for the win will be Roach. I wouldn’t be surprised if Roach is able to gain a lot of new top fighters that will want to be trained by him if Pacquiao wins.

Pacquiao’s success during his career has likely been the major reason why Roach has seen top fighters like Amir Khan, Julio Cesar Chavez Jr, Vanes Martirosyan, Lucian Bute, Miguel Cotto and Ruslan Provodnikov come over to his Wildcard Gym and want to be trained by him. A victory for Pacquiao against Mayweather will definitely help Roach by putting him at the top of the trainer food chain. I wouldn’t be surprised if Roach wins another trainer of the year award like he did recently off in part off of the success of Pacquiao and Cotto. Never mind the fact that Pacquiao and Cotto haven’t beaten any true solid fighters in many, many years.

I don’t think anything is going to change for Pacquiao if he loses to Mayweather. It’ll just be another loss for Pacquiao. I think he should have 8 defeats on his resume, not 5. A loss to Mayweather will be defeat No.9 in my book, and about the only thing I can see changing from a loss like that is maybe a further dip in Pacquiao’s pay-per-view numbers in the future.

I think boxing fans may not want to pay to see Pacquiao fight once he gets beaten by Mayweather. It’ll depend on the guys that Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum matches Pacquiao up against in the future, and how well he does in those fights. If Arum keeps putting Pacquiao in with his Top Rank stable fighters like Brandon Rios, Tim Bradley and other fighters like Chris Algieri, then I see Pacquiao’s popularity plummeting even if he wins those fights. But if Pacquiao faces guys like Miguel Cotto, Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, Gennady Golovkin, Demetrius Andrade, Erislandy Lara and Marcos Maidana, I think Pacquiao will increase his popularity.

Unfortunately, I don’t see Pacquiao fighting any of those. Instead, I think Arum is going to take Pacquiao backwards by putting him back in with the likes of Bradley, Rios and Algieri. Rios’ trainer Robert Garcia is already talking about how he was told that if Rios can pick up one more big victory, he’ll be able to get another fight against Pacquiao. So that tells you what the future of Pacquiao will likely be like after the Mayweather fight.

A victory for Pacquiao over Mayweather would help Pacquiao get a second fight against Mayweather, and the money from that fight should be really good. I don’t know if Pacquiao will be able to get the victory in the first fight with Mayweather though. Pacquiao is too short and his reach too limited for him to be able to connect with enough shots for him to defeat Mayweather.

To beat Mayweather, Pacquiao is going to need a stationary target for him to get his shots off. I don’t care how good Roach’s game plan is for this fight, I don’t see him being able to give Pacquiao a good enough plan for him to be able to get to Mayweather to land enough of his shots to get a victory. Mayweather isn’t going to stand and fight in a phone booth in this fight, because he knows that’s the only chance that Pacquiao has in winning this one.

To be sure, Mayweather might choose to trade with Pacquiao at times in the fight when it suits him, but he’s not going to just give up his advantages in speed and mobility by fighting the shorter fighter’s fight. That would be an insane move by Mayweather if he were to do that. I know Mayweather has given handicaps to his opponents in the past by him choosing to fight without moving around the ring, and by choosing not use a catch-weight, but I don’t think that’s going to happen here with the Pacquiao fight.



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