Roach: Pacquiao will do much better against Mayweather in rematch

By Boxing News - 08/22/2015 - Comments

1-MAYPAC-FIGHTNIGHT-TRAPPFOTOS-5568By Chris Williams: Trainer Freddie Roach is like a dog that can’t let go of an old bone when you’re trying to wrestle it away from him to give him a nice fresh bone. Roach wants his fighter Manny Pacquiao to get a second shot at Floyd Mayweather Jr. so that he can fight him with two healthy shoulders the next time around to show the boxing world that he wasn’t the fighter that was humiliated last May in losing a one-sided 12 round unanimous decision at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Pacquiao has had shoulder surgery since the fight to repair a torn right rotator cuff, and we don’t know if the Filipino fighter will ever regain the full strength and flexibility in his shoulder.

Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum doesn’t plan on putting him in a tune-up fight to see if his shoulder is the same. He’s going to match him as tough as always in his first fight back. I don’t quite understand that but that’s on Pacquiao and Arum to do things that way.

“Manny would do much better in a rematch, if the shoulder gets better,” Roach said to the latimes.com. “We were doing well until the shoulder went in the fourth round and we had a tough time after that. I do think we can beat Mayweather 100%,’ said Roach.

We had the assurances from Roach that Pacquiao would beat Mayweather without any problems the last time around, and it didn’t work out well, did it? Pacquiao supposedly came into the fight with a shoulder injury that got steadily worse as the fight wore on. Some boxing fans still don’t believe Pacquiao had any shoulder injury.

You can only go by what Pacquiao, Arum and Roach says about Pacquiao being injured before and during the fight. But as far as Pacquiao getting a rematch to prove that he can beat Mayweather the second time around with a healthy shoulder, I don’t know that Pacquiao is going to get that second chance.

When you’re on the big stage and you flub up your lines, it’s pretty much it for you. You don’t get a chance to stop the play and rewind the action to fix the mistake you made while saying your lines. The audience sees it as a mistake on your part and figures that you didn’t practice enough to know your lines.

Pacquiao had his chance to make history against Mayweather on May 2nd this year, and he messed things up by fighting poorly, and wound up getting schooled by Mayweather in front of 4.4 million paying customers on HBO/Showtime pay-per-view and in front of a sold out MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

Now Roach, Pacquiao and Arum want a second chance from Mayweather in a rematch. I don’t think Mayweather is going to give Pacquiao a second chance because of his perception of him as being a poor sport, and a fighter that failed to give him the credit that he deserved for taking him to school and clowning him real nice.

“When he came back to the corner, he said he was in a lot of pain. So at that point, there wasn’t a lot I could say, other than to just go out there and do your best,” Roach said.

I wish I could have heard Pacquiao talking about his shoulder injury in between rounds, because I didn’t hear a peep out of him in talking about his shoulder injury. Pacquiao didn’t look like he was in pain in between rounds, and Roach wasn’t tending to his shoulder or showing any signs that Pacquiao was injured. They did a great job of hiding the injury.



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