By Dave Lahr: You can almost guarantee one thing when World Boxing Association welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao fights. His trainer Freddie Roach will predict a knockout win sooner or later in the weeks/months leading up to the bout. It’s almost a given. Roach usually starts with a prediction that Pacquiao will win by a decision and then changes over shortly after with a knockout prediction. And then as the weeks go by, Roach moves his prediction to earlier and earlier rounds until arriving at a figure between the first and third rounds.

In an article from GMA News, Roach is in classic form with his predictions, saying “Manny will knock him [Joshua Clottey] out. I’ve been studying tapes of him [Clottey]. He’s not very good.” Well, Roach, why then is Pacquiao fighting Clottey? If he’s not very good, why is Pacquiao fighting Clottey rather than Shane Mosley, Paul Williams, Floyd Mayweather Jr. or Juan Manuel Marquez.

That’s what gets me. Roach sets up a fight for Pacquiao against a flawed fighter, and then proceeds to talk them down by predicting knockouts or pointing out their many faults. If Clottey is such as easy mark, which I’m in full agreement with incidentally, then why is Pacquiao being matched against Clottey? Is it because he is flawed? That makes sense, I guess. Although I sure would rather be seeing Pacquiao against a fighter without as many defects as Clottey, who I see as walking bag of flaws.

Pacquiao has already faced two flawed fighters in Ricky Hatton and Miguel Cotto in 2009. Isn’t it time that Pacquiao fight someone that is looking good and still fighting at their peak form? I don’t understand the match-making that is being done for Pacquiao. I think Cotto, Clottey and Hatton are good fighters, but I don’t for a second see them as being nearly as good as Mosley, Mayweather or Paul Williams. Why isn’t Pacquiao fighting those guys instead?

Roach says “I think if we break him [Clottey] down, we can get him out of there in the late rounds. He has a passive defense and leaves his body wide open for awhile when he puts his hands up like that. When he [Pacquiao] digs to the body and breaks him down, I think we can get him out of there.” You think?

Everyone was pretty much aware that Clottey has a passive defense and that he leaves his body open as he covers up his head. Those things have been known about Clottey for ages. Cotto took advantage of those weaknesses in his recent fight against Clottey last year, beating him in the later rounds with a hard body attack. But why fight Clottey if Cotto, a person that Pacquiao just finished destroying, already beat Clottey. What good is that?

Roach continues, speaking about Clottey’s size, “I am always a concern, of course. But the thing is, going into the ring, my guy [Pacquiao] is going to be around 149 pounds and the other guy [Clottey] is going to have to be about 10-12 pounds on him and be bigger. But size doesn’t win fights. Ability does.”

Naturally, and it really helps when you choose a guy that was just beaten by one of Pacquiao’s victims. Clottey has few wins over top tier opponents during his career, and has already been beaten by Carlos Baldomir, Antonio Margarito and Cotto. You can see that Clottey has mixed results when facing top tier opponents, which is why it seems odd that Pacquiao is being matched against him rather than Mayweather, Mosley or Paul Williams.