By Dave Lahr: It’s interesting to see trainer Freddie Roach trying to sell the Manny Pacquiao vs. Shane Mosley fight. Here they have picked out an old fighter that’s going to be just four months shy of his 40th birthday by the time the fight takes place on May 7th, and Roach is trying to paint a picture of this being a competitive fight instead of the mismatch that it likely will be.

Mosley has looked shot in his last two bouts against Floyd Mayweather Jr and Sergio Mora. If it were just a one fight thing against Mayweather, then you could ignore Mosley’s poor performance. But the Mora fight pretty much cemented the fact that Mosley is a faded fighter and not the same guy he used to be years ago.

In an article at philstar/com, Roach said “Shane is very durable guy. He has a very good chin. It won’t be easy but I think we can stop him in the later rounds. When we beat [Antonio] Margarito everybody thought he wasn’t the best welterweight.”

I don’t want to be the one to break this to Roach, but boxing fans still think Margarito wasn’t the best welterweight and they don’t think Margarito fought competitively against Pacquiao. That wasn’t what I would consider a competitive fight other one round in which Margarito landed a body shot that almost caused Pacquiao to go down. Other than that one brief point in the fight, Margarito got totally dominated in every other round of the fight and was like a big tall punching bag with arms. He was far too slow to do much against Pacquiao, and it was another case of good match-making by Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum is selecting the slow as molasses and shot looking Margarito instead of an arguably much better opponent like Sergio Martinez, Juan Manuel Marquez and Andre Berto.