Pacquiao says he needs to KO Bradley in the rematch

By Boxing News - 06/11/2012 - Comments

Image: Pacquiao says he needs to KO Bradley in the rematchBy Esteban Garduno: Manny Pacquiao came up short last Saturday night in a 12 round split decision loss to Timothy Bradley. The defeat has been an unpopular one with Pacquiao’s legions of boxing fans with many of them complaining long and hard about the loss.

Pacquiao said to AP “That will make me become a warrior in the next few months because in the rematch my feeling is I don’t want to go the whole 12 rounds.”

If that’s what it takes for Pacquiao to get energized enough to fight hard then so be it. Pacquiao, however, could have made things much easier for himself had he been more aggressive second half of the fight. That’s essentially where Pacquiao gave the fight away by not working hard enough in each round, and letting Bradley outwork and outbox him.

You don’t like to see fighters only working one minute of every round and letting the other guy do most of the work like Pacquiao did last Saturday night. That’s where he gave the fight away. Pacquiao pulled an old veteran trick by taking it easy for the first two-thirds of every round, and then coming on late to try and steal it. That kind of thing works well when you have judges that tend to focus on only the last part of the round when scoring, but for the older judges that worked the Pacquiao-Bradley fight last Saturday, they’ve seen those tricks and weren’t about to reward Pacquiao for not fighting hard consistently.

If Pacquiao doesn’t have the stamina or the legs to fight hard for the full three minutes of every round like younger fighters do, then he may indeed need a knockout win over Bradley if he want’s to ensure that he gets the win next time. However, it would be a lot better if Pacquiao worked his conditioning, maybe dropped some useless muscle that’s slowing him down, and focus on being busy rather than just looking to land one big shot. That was Pacquiao’s problem last Saturday. He was throwing nothing but left hand pot shots, and missing wildly. Pacquiao’s constant missing showed that Bradley was doing a good job of out-boxing him, and that obviously was something that impressed the judges.



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