By Chris Williams: I’ve watched the Manny Pacquiao vs. Joshua Clottey fight a couple of times now and I have to say that I think Pacquiao fought about the dumbest fight I can ever imagine a fighter doing. I’ve seen son poorly fought bouts before, but Pacquiao’s performance last Saturday night really takes the cake. If not for the fact that Clottey fought an even worse fight, I think Pacquiao would have been beaten easily.

Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach told him before the fight to work the body of Clottey, because Freddie saw from watching video of Clottey that it’s hard to land shots to his head because of his clamshell defense. So what does Pacquiao do? He turns around and throws 1200 punches, almost all of them to the head and ending up averaging a pitiful 20% of his shots.

Pacquiao basically pounded on Clottey’s gloves all night long, and only rarely threw any body shots. Roach said the way to get Clottey to drop his high guard was for Pacquiao to throw to the body. But instead of following Roach’s advice, Pacquiao foolishly threw shots to the head all night long. Pacquiao wasted all those shots in which he averaged over a 100 punches thrown per round.

Pacquiao might as well have saved himself the trouble of throwing all those useless shots and spent his time more wisely being more selective. Clottey may not have thrown many punches during the fight, but at least the ones he was throwing actually were landing instead of missing. I still don’t know why Roach didn’t talk some sense into Pacquiao’s head in between rounds.

How he can Roach have just let Pacquiao fight such a dumb fight? I noticed that a lot of the time that Roach was taking to Pacquiao in between rounds, Pacquiao’s eyes were looking upwards, possibly viewing the replays of the previous around along with the crowd. Roach needed to snap Pacquiao’s mind back to the present with what he was trying to tell the guy, because Pacquiao fought the entire fight the exact same way.

Round after round, Pacquiao rained shots on Clottey’s gloves as if it was some kind of ploy to get Clottey to drop his gloves. If this was what Pacquiao was trying to do, it didn’t work because Clottey kept his clamshell defense up the entire fight and did a great job of limiting Pacquiao to a poor 20% connect rate.

I’m sorry, but I can’t ever see Pacquiao beat Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Shane Mosley. You have to fight smart to beat those fighters and have a good plan that you can carry out to the letter. If Roach told Pacquiao to go to the body to get Clottey to drop his guard, then Pacquiao failed miserably at following Roach’s instructions.

Pacquiao might as well have been his own trainer for that fight because he did zero adjustments during the fight as far as I can tell, and seemed to be aiming his shots at Clottey’s gloves rather than trying to land to the body the way he should have been doing.