By Chris Williams: Manny Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach is hoping and praying with all his might that Pacquiao can stop the fading, aging and stamina-weakened 39-year-old Shane Mosley on Saturday night in order to motivated boxing’s best fighter Floyd Mayweather Jr. sign for a fight with Pacquiao. Roach is hoping that by Pacquiao putting in a better performance against Mosley, who hasn’t won a fight in over two years, than what Mayweather did in totally dominating Mosley by a lopsided 12 round decision last year, it will get Mayweather the urge to want to prove himself against Pacquiao.

Speaking with Reuters, Roach said “I want to prove to Mayweather we can do something he hasn’t. That is why I want to knock this guy [referring to Mosley] out just to give him [Mayweather] another dig and maybe give him some incentive to sign that contract…If he wants to show it, prove it.”

I kind of doubt that Mayweather will be swayed by a KO of Mosley to decide to fight Pacquiao. They already had a chance to fight Mayweather last year but failed to agree to the random blood testing that he wanted. It seemed like Pacquiao’s team had an attitude that the Mayweather fight was something they could quickly pick up at a later date, because they quickly gave up on the negotiations when Mayweather asked for a two week cut off on the drug testing. That wasn’t an unreasonable request by any means because it seems silly to have a cut off on drug testing anyway. Pacquiao wanted a three week cut off. Instead of sticking it out and meeting Mayweather half way or coming up with a number that they both could agree on, Pacquiao’s team decided to face Joshua Clottey, one of the Top Rank stable fighters, and they lost the opportunity to fight Mayweather with that move. In hindsight, I imagine they wished they had agreed to the 2 weeks that Mayweather asked for because then they would have had the fight instead of a bout against Clottey, which turned out to be an incredibly boring fight. The bout brought in only 700,000 PPV buys. You can only imagine what the numbers that Pacquiao vs. Mayweather would have brought in.

If Roach wants a fight between Pacquiao and Mayweather, instead of beating an old fighter like Mosley, he’d be better off having Pacquiao agree to the random blood tests that Mayweather wants for the fight. Mayweather came out recently and said that if Pacquiao takes the test, they could fight. That seems to be the direction that Roach needs to be going in instead of selecting a fighter that’s arguably over the hill like Mosley and then hoping that Mayweather will want to fight Pacquiao if he is able to knock the old Mosley out.