By Chris Williams: Manny Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach openly admits that Pacquiao will be fighting someone else in his next fight in June and not Mayweather. Roach doesn’t do the selection of who Pacquiao fights, but he thinks it’s going to be Timothy Bradley or Lamont Peterson who get the call for the fight and not Miguel Cotto or Juan Manuel Marquez.

Roach told Dan Rafael of ESPN “My theory of what’s going to happen is Mayweather will fight someone and Pacquiao will fight Lamont Peterson or Bradley and in November they’ll finally fight each other.”
That sounds more like Roach’s preference than any kind of inside knowledge of what’s going on. Bob Arum does the selection for Pacquiao and he’s obviously not going to share that information with Roach until he’s ready to go public with it.

Roach hopes the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight will happen in November but I don’t see anything that will be any different than it is now. Arum could have made the fight now but instead chose to match Pacquiao with one of four guys that he’s itching to put him in with.

After Pacquiao’s fight in November, there will still be three guys that Arum hasn’t matched Pacquiao up with from his list and you can guess Arum will keep putting off the Mayweather fight until all three of the remaining fighters have been put in with Pacquiao. I have my doubts that Arum will match Pacquiao with Mayweather at that time because Arum likes to fight the same guys over and over again, so we could see Pacquiao fight Cotto for a third time and also see him against Bradley and Peterson again.

Mayweather is still saying he only wants to fight Pacquiao but he’s being pretty much ignored by Arum, who will likely will be making his announcement for Pacquiao’s next opponent next week or sooner. It won’t be Mayweather and it sure won’t be Mayweather next November, not when there’s still more guys on Arum’s list for Pacquiao to fight.