By Chris Williams: It’s going to be interesting to see if Manny Pacquiao shoots for a 9th world title after he finishes beating the stuffing out of Antonio Margarito for the vacant World Boxing Council light middleweight title on November 13th. That fight will be Pacquiao’s eighth world title, but you have figure that he’s going to keep reaching for more if he looks good in dispatching Margarito.
I just wonder if the junior middleweight is the upper limit to what Pacquiao can accomplish. The middleweight champions are all pretty solid fighters and I can’t see Pacquiao beating any of them unless they have to fight in one of Pacquiao’s god awful catch weights. In that case, one of them might be weakened enough so that Pacquiao could win a controversial decision, but that’s really reaching.
I think Pacquiao will get battered if he takes on the current middleweight champions, which as follows: Felix Sturm, Sergio Martinez, Dmitriy Pirog, and Sebastian Sylvester. I doubt that Pacquiao would take on Martinez and Pirog because they seem to be the most solid of the bunch. But I also doubt that Pacquiao would choose to fight Sturm, because he’s a pure boxer and would be immune to Pacquiao’s style of fighting.
Sturm would likely riddle Pacquiao to pieces if he tried to bum rush him the way he does all his opponents. The fighter I see Pacquiao fighting is Sylvester, who is arguably the weakest of the middleweight champions. Yeah, it would be seen by many as a cherry picking move, but then again what can you expect?
Pacquiao would have to go after the fighter that he has the best chance of beating and I think Pirog and Martinez would literally beat the brakes off Pacquiao and send him home in bad shape.
It’s too bad there isn’t a Top Rank champion among the middleweight title holders, because then it would be easier for Pacquiao because he could probably get the catch weight that he wants to get an edge in the fight.
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