By Chris Williams: Freddie Roach thinks Antonio Margarito will be too slow for Manny Pacquiao next Saturday night in their fight at the Cowboys Stadium, in Arlington, Texas. Margarito is the biggest and the best welterweight that Pacquiao has faced up to now.

Although the fight is technically taking place at the bottom limit of the junior middleweight division for Pacquiao’s requested catch-weight of 150 pounds, Margarito isn’t a junior middleweight and never has been one.

The vacant WBC junior middleweight title will be up for grabs in this fight. If Pacquiao captures it, he’ll likely never defend it because the ranked contenders either aren’t well known enough to fight or are simply too dangerous for Pacquiao to mix it up with, even with a catch-weight handicap working for him.

Margarito is slow and stationary, but real junior middleweights like James Kirkland and Erislandy Lara are powerful and move well on their feet. That’s probably a bridge too far for Pacquiao to take, so this is likely the end of Pacquiao and his fights at junior middleweight. It’s too bad he didn’t face a real junior middleweight instead of Margarito, a welterweight that the WBC has ranked for this fight.

Speaking with Philstar.com, Roach says “We will beat him to the punch every time. He is very slow. He is a decent body-puncher but he really, really telegraphs those punches, really, really long and Manny will work on the counter shot. Margarito pulls back and cocks his punches and he is wide open. He will get knocked out.”

Roach is right about all those observations. Margarito is painfully slow and wide open for getting hit by counter shots. The thing of it is Pacquiao showed no ability to block uppercuts in his recent fight with Joshua Clottey, and that’s something Roach might want to go over two or three times with Pacquiao before next Saturday because Margarito is going to be throwing a lot of uppercuts.

If Pacquiao can’t hurt Margarito, Pacquiao is going to take a major beating unless he turns tail and runs. Margarito will literally beat the stuffing out of Pacquiao if the Filipino is unable to knock him out. I wouldn’t want to be in Pacquiao’s shoes if he’s unable to knock Margarito out nor in Roach’s, because he’ll be the one looking silly trying to give Pacquiao worthless instructions to save him from his beating.