By Chris Williams: Top Rank promoter put a nice spin on why Manny Pacquiao has been looking so ragged in his sparring sessions lately as he trains for his up and coming November 13th fight against Antonio Margarito, saying in an article at abs-cbnnews.com “At this point you don’t want to turn it on, because you’ve got to save it for the fight.”

That would sound alright, except for the fact that Pacquiao has never had this problem before in his previous training camps and appears to be having problems with either the weight that he’s putting on, his conditioning, and his mental focus on the fight. Perhaps his advancing age is also a big factor as well.

Pacquiao looked exhausted and old at times in his fight with Joshua Clottey in March, and it was if Pacquiao had aged five years between fights. Putting on weight, even if it’s muscle, is hard on your body. It causes your heart to have to work harder and it messes with your cardiovascular system. That’s why fighters with a lot of muscle of aren’t particularly good at fighting long distance fights. They do well in the first few rounds and then wear down quickly, especially if you set a high pace for them. Margarito looks to be training to set a real high pace in this fight, and as ragged as Pacquiao is looking from the weight gain and whatever else is plaguing him, he may not be up for it.

I think Pacquiao is going to have problems and likely lose this fight unless he can get Margarito out of there early like he did with Ricky Hatton last year.

Arum continues with his spin on Pacquiao, saying “All in all, its good, Most of it is satisfactory.” Yeah, the Titanic was going really well until it hit the iceberg. I don’t think the training is going good at all, and it’s showing clearly that Pacquiao is having problems.

Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach, as is his custom, continues to see only rosy predictions for Pacquiao, saying “It’s nine rounds. It’s okay.” Roach is convinced Pacquiao will stop Margarito in eight or nine rounds. This is a line that Roach has been parroting for a while now in interviews. However, he was dead wrong in his prediction about Pacquiao’s last fight against Clottey. In that one, Roach predicted yet another knockout win for the Filipino fighter and also said it would be an exciting fight.

You could see it wouldn’t be going into the bout, but yet Roach said it would be an exciting fight. It turned out to be one of the most boring fights in memory, and Pacquiao never came close to stopping Clottey. If anything, if the fight had been a 15 round bout, I think it would have been more likely that Pacquiao would have been stopped rather than Clottey, because Pacquiao took a beating in that fight.