By Chris Williams: After beating Victor Postol (28-1, 12 KOs) tonight to claim his WBC light welterweight title, Terence Crawford (29-0, 20 KOs) appears to feel that he’s in the position to call the shots for a fight against Manny Pacquiao that he and his promoter Bob Arum BADLY want. Crawford says that if a fight between him and Pacquiao takes place this year on November 5, then Pacquiao will need to move down to 140lbs to fight him for his WBC/WBO light welterweight titles. Crawford won’t fight Pacquiao at welterweight.
“It will be at 140,” Crawford said via ESPN.com, when asked what weight he would consider a fight against Pacquiao.
Asking the aging Pacquiao to come boil down to a weight division that he hasn’t fought at in the last eight years since 2008 isn’t exactly fair to Pacquiao, is it? Pacquiao is 37-years-old now, and he hasn’t fought at light welterweight since his win over David Diaz in June 2008. To me, Crawford setting the condition for a fight against Pacquiao is a deal breaker. If there was any real interest from Pacquiao in fighting Crawford, I think he might have killed it tonight by saying that he needs to come down to 140.
“If Bob Arum wants that fight and my coaches want that fight, that’s something we’ll talk about later,” Crawford said. “I let my coaches handle that. I am a fighter and I will fight anybody. I’m happy and I’m about to go on vacation. We not worried about Manny Pacquiao right now.”
Crawford was said to have rehydrated to 157 pounds tonight for the Postol fight. Why he would need to fight at 140 is anyone’s guess. My thoughts are that if Crawford were to fight at 147, then boxing fans and writers would pressure him to fight the top welterweights like Errol Spence and Keith Thurman. Let’s be real here; If Spence or Thurman were in the ring with Crawford tonight, they would have walked him down and blasted him out.
Crawford is too frail to beat those guys, and he couldn’t run from them without getting caught sooner or later and knocked out. If Crawford fights Pacquiao at 147, he would be expected to fight the younger lions in that weight division like Spence, Thurman and Shawn Porter. I don’t think that would work out well at all for Crawford. I also don’t think his 84-year-old promoter Bob Arum would let Crawford fight them, because those guys wouldn’t be slowed down by the pitty pat shots Crawford threw tonight. He would be little more than a speed bump for them.
If I’m Pacquiao, I would tell Crawford to hit the road with his request for him to come down to 140. I don’t think Pacquiao should entertain that request even for a second. He needs to tell Crawford to earn a fight against him the proper way by moving up to 147, beating Spence or Thurman, and stay in the pocket while doing so. In other words, no running from Spence and Thurman like we saw tonight with Crawford running from Postol. If Crawford can beat Spence and Thurman by staying in the pocket the way that Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather typically fought, then he will have earned the fight in my opinion. Apart from that, Crawford doesn’t rate a fight against Pacquiao. I’m just saying.