By Manuel Perez: Freddie Roach is back to his art of predicting fights again, this time Roach is predicting that Floyd Mayweather Jr. will beat Juan Manuel Marquez on Saturday. “I like Mayweather to win on a decision, although it might be a boring fight because they are both naturally counter punchers,” Roach said.
Roach is probably praying that Mayweather wins the fight because this will increase the chances of a mega fight between Manny Pacquiao and Mayweather. There’s a couple of problems with that, however. First of all, Mayweather is going to lose to Marquez on Saturday night and throw a wrench in Roach’s big plans for big fight that would probably break records in pay-per-view buys.
Secondly, I think Cotto is going to literally wipe the deck with Pacquiao, and beat him much worse than Marquez did in his two fights with Pacquiao. Yeah, I know Marquez didn’t get the wins in those fights but I – and a lot of other boxing experts – think Marquez should have been given the win.
Okay, so Marquez is going to do a job on Mayweather on Saturday night and make him like the oldest 32-year-old you’ve seen. 32 is old, don’t you know that? I’ve seen people that age that look like grandfathers. And I think Mayweather is starting to look like kind of aged around the gills. You can’t look old on the outside without being old inside the body. It starts with the reflexes.
Mayweather won’t be able to pull the trigger on his punches the way that he did in the past two years ago. No doubt, Mayweather will see the openings for shots, but the punches won’t come. He’ll be thinking, ‘Okay, next time I’ll get him.” But Mayweather will keep letting the opportunities go by while Marquez drives some serious leather into his tender ribcage and maybe finds that bad rib that hurt previously.
Here’s another one of Roach’s pearls of wisdom: “Marquez is obviously going to have to take the lead and force the fight but he is more comfortable in the counter-punching mode.”
You think? Of course Marquez is going to have to be the aggressor in this fight. Marquez would be waiting around 100 years for Mayweather to come to him and try initiate the offense. Mayweather isn’t going to stick his neck out and risk getting his head exploded like those two speed bags that Marquez blew up on HBO’s Mayweather-Marquez 24/7 series. Marquez is punching too hard now that he’s put on muscle and he’s no joke.
“It’s going to be difficult for him because of Mayweather’s speed and movement,” Roach says. That’s the only reason why the fight is going to be difficult. If you took away Mayweather’s speed and movement, what you have? You’d have a stationary fighter with no hand speed or power looking silly in the corner doing shoulder rolls. It would be hilarious to look at. Seriously, I don’t know how much speed Mayweather has left in his body. He looked slow and a lot weaker in the Mayweather-Marquez 24/7 episodes.
I heard that Mayweather had two operations during his retirement for rotator cuff injuries. That can’t have helped Mayweather any for whatever shoulder the injury occurred. Boxing fans are picturing Mayweather as the same fighter that beat Ricky Hatton and Oscar De La Hoya in 2007. I doubt that fighter still exists anymore to be honest.
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