By Dan Ambrose: In case you haven’t noticed, trainer Freddie Roach has been talking in the media recently about how poor his fighter Manny Pacquiao has been looking during training sessions. This has been an off and on thing with Roach, as he’s either predicting a knockout win for Pacquiao over Antonio Margarito or pointing out how poor Pacquiao is looking in sparring sessions and in the general training for the November 13th fight.

It looks to me that Roach is trying to ride both sides of the fence to try and pump up the pay per view and ticket sales for the fight, which will be taking place at the Cowboys Stadium, in Arlington, Texas. This kind of thing wouldn’t be needed had Bob Arum picked a popular opponent for Pacquiao to fight on November 13th.

There was a lot of different options out there for Pacquiao to take on, such as Andre Berto, Shane Mosley, Juan Manuel Marquez, Sergio Martinez, Paul Williams, Timothy Bradley, Amir Khan and Devon Alexander, to name just a small amount of potential opponents for the Filipino star.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather watch Pacquiao face any one of those fighters rather than seeing him take on a fighter like Margarito. Those guys are at least still fighting well, which is more than I can say for Margarito. He hasn’t looked good in the ring for two years since beating Miguel Cotto.

Roach seems to be talking Pacquiao and it makes me wonder why he’s doing it. I can’t stand being manipulated, and with Roach saying how bad Pacquiao is looking, it feels like he’s trying to get more people to believe that Pacquiao is having problems in order to increase revenue for the fight.

That’s all well and good, but I prefer to see the fight for what it is – a mismatch between Pacquiao and a fighter on a steep decline. We don’t even know if Margarito’s great punching ability in the past was all of him or a product of loaded hand wraps. That’s why the choice of Margarito for this fight seemed to come at the wrong time.

If he had proven that he could still fight by beating some other top fighters, then I could see the point in Pacquiao being matched up against him. But with Margarito looking terrible in a loss to Shane Mosley, and mediocre in a win over Roberto Garcia earlier this year, he would seem to be a really bad choice of an opponent right now.