By Scott Gilfoid: Manny Pacquiao has surprised a lot of people by asking his fans last weekend to vote on his twitter in a poll consisting of these four fighters – Amir Khan, Kell Brook, Terence Crawford and Jeff Horn – for his next fight in April, which he says will be taking place in the United Arab Emirates.
By including Brook and Khan’s name to the list, it appears that Pacquiao is now taken control over his boxing career in terms of the match-making. Pacquiao’s 85-year promoter Bob Arum has been the one that has selected opponents for him since he signed with Top Rank a decade ago, and the promoter has largely matched him against fighters from his own stable.
For Brook, you could see Pacquiao as throwing him a lifeline if he were to select him for his April fight. Brook would then not have to face the dangerous Errol Spence Jr. Brook has been ordered by the International Boxing Federation to defend his IBF welterweight title against Spence. Brook has not seemed too have been not thrilled at the idea.
If Pacquiao can throw Brook a bone, then he would have an excuse not to fight Spence, and the boxing public wouldn’t criticize him nearly as bad if he vacated his IBF title to take that fight.
“See you in UAE for my next fight. #TeamPacquiao”, said Pacquiao on Twitter.
Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum has talked about wanting to match him against Jeff Horn for his next fight in April. Pacquiao would have to fight in Horn’s home city of Brisbane, Australia. Pacquiao’s tweet over the weekend asking the boxing fans to vote for his next opponent could be a signal to Arum that he doesn’t want to fight the guy that he’s picked out for him in Jeff Horn. Adding Khan and Brook to his four-fighter choice of potential opponents suggests that Pacquiao is interested in fighting two of the most popular British welterweights.
Besides co-promoting Jeff Horn, Arum also promotes Terence Crawford, who is one of the names in Pacquiao’s four-fighter list that he’s asking the boxing fans to vote on. However, Crawford is getting wiped out in the poll. Khan is far ahead of him. If Pacquiao decides he doesn’t want to fight Horn, will Arum attempt to match him against his fighter Crawford and ignore his Twitter poll?
Twitter polls aren’t exactly the best way for a fighter to pick an opponent. We saw how Khan won a Twitter poll that Floyd Mayweather Jr. had created for his own social media account many years ago when he asked the boxing fans to pick between Khan and Marcos Maidana. When Khan easily won the poll, Mayweather chose to ignore the poll and go with Maidana as his opponent.