By Chris Williams: Alex Ariza, the strength and conditioning coach for Floyd Mayweather Jr. (48-0, 26 KOs), saw how Manny Pacquiao (57-6-2, 38 KOs) struggled last Saturday night in his one-sided defeat at the hands of Mayweather.
Ariza noticed that things were in a state of chaos in Pacquiao’s corner with his trainer Freddie Roach trying to come up with some kind of solution for what Mayweather was doing inside the ring. Ariza thinks that Pacquiao needs to get a new team behind him that can help him out so that he can bounce back and still be a top fighter.
Ariza feels that Pacquiao was out there on his own in the fight and not with any kind of a game plan other than his own natural instincts, which is why he feels that Pacquiao needs to get a new team so that he can get the proper guidance he needs to keep fighting at the upper level.
“What I saw tonight was a fighter [Pacquiao] in there by himself. He was going on instinct,” Ariza said via Fighthype. “He reacted. I saw the disarray in the corner. I still think that if Manny can get a good team behind him, a team with credentials and a history of success in dealing with elite athletes at the elite level, I think Manny could come back and be something to be reckoned with.”
What Ariza seems to be saying is that Pacquiao needs to dump his trainer Roach, and look to find someone else that can give him better guidance in his fights. When Ariza said that Pacquiao needs to get a good team behind him, he didn’t say which guys he feels should go and which ones should stay. But when you lose as badly as Pacquiao did against Mayweather, I think a full overhaul of his team might be the best thing for him. That means from top to bottom, Pacquiao cleansing the team by dumping them all and finding a new training team that can help fix all the flaws in his game.
As we saw in the Mayweather fight, Pacquiao has a number of issues that need immediate fixing starting with the way he comes straight in when attacking his opponents. Roach should have fixed this in training camp. Actually, Roach should have fixed this problem five years ago when Pacquiao started coming straight at his opponents in a straight line rather than using angles. Pacquiao also needs to move his head move, and throw jabs. He doesn’t use his jab enough, and this makes it easy to predict what he’s going to do in the ring.
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