Roach: We [Pacquiao] have the winning formula for this fight

By Boxing News - 05/01/2015 - Comments

Freddie RoachBy Dan Ambrose: After weeks of hard work in training camp and long hours spent studying fight video, trainer Freddie Roach believes his guy Manny Pacquiao is fully ready to go out and defeat Floyd Mayweather Jr. on Saturday night.

Roach says that Pacquiao has essentially been training for this fight against Mayweather for five years now, and they’re finally ready to spring it on the 38-year-old fighter tomorrow night on May 2nd at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Even with the perfect plan, it’s going to be hard work for Pacquiao to pull off the upset. Mayweather is able to adapt to almost any style that’s used against him, which is why Roach has studied every tendency that he’s seen from Mayweather in watching each of his fights so that he could get Pacquiao ready for anything that he could possibly do in the ring.

“We’ve have trained so hard for this fight. This fight has two of the best fighters fighting each other,” Roach said via Fightnews.com. “I’ve been training Manny for this fight for five years. We know all about him, we have covered all the bases. I think we have the winning formula to win this fight.”

Hopefully the fight game plan that Pacquiao will be using on Saturday won’t be a five-year-old strategy that has been sitting around collecting dust all these years because that might not be a good thing if that’s Roach’s idea of a game plan. Roach said recently that he would adapt/make changes to the old game plan that he had for Pacquiao to beat Mayweather to accommodate the aging that has gone on with Mayweather. What would have worked perfectly five years ago in 2010 might not work too well in 2015 with the current version of Mayweather that exists today.

There is also the problem of Pacquiao aging as well. Roach needs to recognize that Pacquiao has lost a few steps in the last five years, and isn’t the young dynamo that was knocking everybody out in his fights 2007 to 2009. The knockouts are a thing of the past for Pacquiao, and he now has to be content with him working hard to grind out all of his victories the hard way by going the distance each time he fights.

Roach needs to be saying we have the ‘winning formulas’ rather than saying it’s a “winning formula” because that suggests there’s only a plan-A for Pacquiao. It’s well and good if Roach has come up with a good plan-A for the Filipino star, but he might need a backup plan or two for him to be able to compete against Mayweather on Saturday. Going with one plan for this fight is like going on a long drip in an automobile without a spare tire. Sure, you might not suffer a flat tire along the way, but if you do then you’ll be out of luck.



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