By Sean McDaniel: After easily defeating former IBF welterweight champion Joshua Clottey by a 12 round lopsided unanimous decision on Saturday night at the Dallas Cowboy Stadium, Manny Pacquiao is now calling for Floyd Mayweather Jr. to fight him. Pacquiao says “I want that fight, but it’s up to him. I’m ready to fight any time. Maybe if [Shane] Mosley wins, I’ll fight him. Floyd’s style isn’t that difficult, though.” There’s one problem with Pacquiao fighting Mayweather and that’s the Olympic style blood testing that Mayweather wants.
Pacquiao has been adverse to taking the random blood tests when they attempted to work out a fight together previously. It’s doubtful that Pacquiao will have changed his mind now that he’s beaten Clottey. If anything, Pacquiao is likely to have hardened his stance on the subject of blood testing, and if one was to read the tea leaves based on what Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach has been saying about Pacquiao taking blood tests, it’s not hard to come to the conclusion there won’t be a fight between Pacquiao and Mayweather ever.
Roach has been saying that it’s up to the commission (the Nevada or Texas Athletic Commission] to decide what kind of testing that will be done for a fight between Mayweather and Pacquiao. Since neither of these states require blood testing, the only way that blood testing will be done is if the two fighters agree to it. Without the blood testing, Mayweather probably won’t be interested in fighting Pacquiao.
Mayweather was agreeable last time to limited blood testing that doesn’t truly fit into the category of random. It was random up to a point, stopping at agreed upon day before the fight. Mayweather wanted 14 days while Pacquiao wanted 24 days. This is the problem. If Pacquiao is agreeable to the blood testing, then there should be no problems setting up a fight between him and Mayweather.
Pacquiao looked great on Saturday night, defeating Clottey and making him look like a punching bag in the process. Pacquiao landed over 1200 punches, although most of them were blocked on Clottey’s gloves. There were over 50,000 boxing fans in the Dallas Cowboy Stadium to witness the fight. Instead of an action packed bout like the one that Roach and many people thought it would be, the fight was a dull affair with Clottey holding up his guard and blocking punches all night long.
He did an admirable job of blocking the shots, but forgot about throwing punches back at Pacquiao. The fight, along with the high number of mismatches on the undercard, was disappointing to say the least. It was a bad match up going into the fight because Clottey wasn’t known for being an offensive fighter and had failed in most of his previous attempts at fighting 1st tier fighter.
Clottey looked even worse than he had in his losses to Carlos Baldomir, Antonio Margarito and Miguel Cotto. At least in those fights, Clottey attempted to throw punches for a small amount of rounds before tiring. In Saturday’s fight, Clottey never did get untracked and made the fight look like a sparring session between two Top Rank fighters that new each other.
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