By Sean McDaniel: Freddie Roach thinks that Manny Pacquiao will score a knockout over Joshua Clottey on March 13th. In an article at the Manila Bulletin, Roach says “He’s [Clottey] got a good chin but we’ll make him quit sometime late in the fight.” If Roach’s prediction comes true, it would be the first time that the 32-year-old Clottey has been stopped during his 15 year career. Clottey has been in with some good punchers before, surviving but losing to both Antonio Margarito and Miguel Cotto, neither of which even came close to stopping or hurting Clottey.

If Roach’s prediction is to bear out, Pacquiao will have to fight at a higher level than he did in his last fight against Cotto, because it took Pacquiao until the last minute of the 12th round to score a knockout in that fight, and Cotto looked as if he could still fight at the time that referee Kenny Bayless pulled the plug on Cotto.

There’s a real danger for Pacquiao that he could get hurt if he goes after Clottey too hard trying to fulfill yet another one of Roach’s knockout predictions. Clottey can punch hard, and has a good left hook and uppercut. If Pacquiao goes after Clottey a little bit too much, he could run into something from him and get hurt him. Pacquiao, unlike Clottey, has been hurt in a number of his fights against smaller and lesser punchers, so there’s a danger that Pacquiao himself could end up getting taken out if he gets a little too ambitious in this fight.

Pacquiao has stopped four consecutive opponents since winning a controversial 12 round split decision over Juan Manuel Marquez in March 2008. Pacquiao seems to have become a better puncher all of a sudden in the past two years despite getting older. The credit for that has to go to the great training of Roach as well as Pacquiao’s conditioning coach Alex Ariza. The two of them have improved on the natural talent that Pacquiao already has going for him and made him even more dangerous than he was before.

In a teleconference today, Pacquiao, speaking about Floyd Mayweather Jr., “Some fighters like me, we can be the greatest fighter without trash talk. His style is, you know, he’s talking a lot of trash talk to be known as Mayweather like that, to be known as champion, but it’s not a good example for everybody. I believe I don’t really need to fight Mayweather because what I have actually done in boxing right now, I think is good enough for me.”

Pacquiao has captured titles in seven different weight divisions, and might possibly go after an eighth at some point in the future before he hangs up the gloves for good. For Pacquiao to fight Mayweather, he will have to either agree to the random blood tests that Floyd wants or else there won’t be a fight. Mayweather probably won’t change his mind about wanting random blood tests to be conducted in the future if they were to fight.