Is Pacquiao too flawed to beat Mayweather?

By Boxing News - 05/06/2010 - Comments

Image: Is Pacquiao too flawed to beat Mayweather?By Chris Williams: Should the mega fight get put together between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao, I have strong feeling that Pacquiao is going to get totally dominated by Mayweather, beaten even worse than Shane Mosley was last weekend. The reasons are simple. If you look at how the limited Joshua Clottey was blasting Pacquiao with uppercuts and right hands in their fight in March, it seems pretty clear that Pacquiao is going to be in deep trouble against a skilled fighter like Mayweather.

Clottey couldn’t miss with his shots. Whatever Clottey threw seemed to sail right through Pacquiao’s wide open guard and tag him in the head. It was kind of shocking and surprising to see Pacquiao’s head getting lifted up again and again by big uppercuts from Clottey. Pacquiao needs to be thankful that Clottey threw few punches in the fight, because if he threw over 1000 punches like Pacquiao did in the fight, I think we would still be picking up the pieces of Pacquiao’s jaw even now.

Mayweather will be a lot busier than Clottey and with Pacquiao just storming him all night long like he did Clottey, there’s going to be a million openings for Mayweather to land his counter punches. Pacquiao could end up getting flattened like Ricky Hatton was in his fight with Pacquiao. There’s little doubt how Pacquiao is going to try and fight Mayweather. He’s going to go right after Mayweather and try to overwhelm him with punches. That’s really Pacquiao’s only chance – to overwhelm and try and wear Mayweather down.

If Pacquiao plays it cool and uses and in and out attack, he’s going to get literally picked clean by Mayweather. Pacquiao will get clobbered as he dashes in and when he moves back outside. And on the outside, Mayweather dominate the action with his better jab, right hand and left hook. Pacquiao won’t have the reach to compete with Mayweather on the outside and will absolutely need to come in after him to try and land his shots. Freddie Roach, Pacquiao’s trainer, will no doubt be giving Pacquiao orders to try and wear Mayweather out with a high volume punch output. Roach has his mind made up that Mayweather can’t move after watching his last two fights against Juan Manuel Marquez and Mosley.

As such, Roach is going to figure on sending Pacquiao out on attack missions against Mayweather to try and overwhelm him with punches. It’s a style that’s good for a slugger who has a good chin, but I don’t see it working well for Pacquiao. His defense is too poor, his lateral movement too lacking and his chin too weak to take the shots that Mayweather will be plastering him with. We already saw Pacquiao get hurt by Juan Manuel Marquez in their last fight. Mayweather hits harder than Marquez and will be hitting Pacquiao a lot more often. I just don’t see how Pacquiao will have the game to beat Mayweather. There’s just too many holes in Pacquiao’s game to beat a skilled fighter like Mayweather.


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Last Updated on 05/07/2010

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