By Manuel Perez: Well, Ricky Hatton has won the first part of tonight’s battle with Manny Pacquiao by beating him in yesterday’s weigh-in stare down, and causing Pacquiao to look away first. I can’t stress enough the importance of the winning the psychological part of boxing, because that plays a huge factor in the eventual outcome of a fight. Look at any big fight, and nine times out of ten, the ultimate winner of the fight had gained the upper hand mentally before the fight by psyching out his opponent.
In yesterday’s weigh-in, Hatton and Pacquiao came together face to face and locked eyes on each other for about five seconds. Hatton looked like pure steel, almost as if he was going to shoot some laser beams through both his eyes into the head of Pacquiao, ala Bolt style.
Pacquiao couldn’t handle the stare down, started smiling sheepishly and reached out to shake Hatton’s hands, as if surrendering to the more powerful fighter. Hatton was having none of it, and continued to look straight at Pacquiao, eyes not blinking and looking like a stone cold punching machine.
Hatton was not smiling and looked like he wanted to tear Pacquiao’s head off with a punch. Pacquiao, cringing a little, put his hands up by his ribs as if were expect Hatton to lay into his body with a huge punch at any second. I felt sorry for Pacquiao at that moment because he looked like he was literally melting away in front of a large sun.
It was bad, because Pacquiao couldn’t look into Hatton’s eyes and looked really submissive and not at all confident. I’ve seen a gillion weigh-ins before, but never have I seen a fighter get stared down as badly as Hatton did to Pacquiao. It seemed that Pacquiao couldn’t wait to get off the stage, and get away from Hatton as fast as possible.
I wasn’t entirely sure who was going to win tonight’s fight until I saw the weigh-in, and now I’m positively certain that Hatton will be knocking Pacquiao out before long. I’m just wondering how Pacquiao is going to perform? I just don’t like the way he looked out there, like he wanted to find a hole to hide his head or something. Sheesh!
Well, I just hope that Pacquiao makes it interesting for a little while at least and doesn’t stink up the joint by folding too quickly. Hatton is the much stronger fighter, and this will be a huge step up in class for Pacquiao. He really has nothing to compare to what he’ll be facing tonight against Hatton.
You can’t count Pacquiao’s win over Oscar De La Hoya, because Oscar never laid so much of a glove on him, and he was so emaciated and weight drained, even if Oscar could land anything, it wouldn’t have hurt Pacquiao.
In Manny’s other recent fights, he’s beaten David Diaz, Juan Manuel Marquez, and Marco Antonio Barrera, all of them much weaker punchers than Hatton. Marquez is a good puncher, but he’s more of a pumped up featherweight and doesn’t have nearly the same power as the big punchers in the light welterweight division.
Diaz isn’t a big puncher either nor is Barrera. Both of them are more like featherweights in terms of power. That’s what I’m talking about when I say that Pacquiao is going to be getting hit much harder than he has before. I saw his sparring partners and they looked pathetic. Small, weak and nothing like Hatton. Pacquiao is going to get massacred tonight.
Oh, for the need to know, Hatton weighed in at 140, and Manny came in at 138 during the weigh-in.
Comments are closed.