By Chris Williams: Trainer Freddie Roach has been talking long and hard about how his fighter Manny Pacquiao (54-4-2, 38 KO’s) needs a KO to beat 39-year-old Juan Manuel Marquez (54-6-1, 39 KO’s) on December 8th in their fourth and hopefully their last fight with each other.
Roach has set it up to be a case where Pacquiao probably won’t be able to get a decision int his fight, because the judges will want to bend over backwards to give Marquez a decision because of the past three fights between them where Marquez appeared to win but was either given losses or a draw.
Roach really wants Pacquiao to get a KO, and he says that Pacquiao feels the same way. But the question is can Pacquiao knockout anyone halfway decent at this point in his career? I know he can probably knockout some scrub fighters, but given that his promoter Bob Arum is trying to maximize the pay per view loot that Pacquiao beings in my putting him against the biggest names possible to get the most money, it’s not likely that Pacquiao will be fighting anymore guys that he can KO anymore.
He’s aged to the point where he can’t get knockouts. This is why I think Roach is really hurting Pacquiao egging him on to try and score a KO over Marquez. By doing that, Roach could be leading Pacquiao into another loss. It’s like when you have an old horse. That horse might have been able to jump tall fences when it was younger. But if you take him out when he’s well into his years and can no longer jump like he used, you’re going to end up smashing into the fence with that horse if you try to get him to jump anything tall. The same thing with Pacquiao.
Roach shouldn’t be trying to get him to KO anyone, because he’s not the young fighter he once was. All it’s going to happen if Roach keeps pushing Pacquiao is that he’ll come out fast for the first three rounds and then promptly run out of gas at the midpoint in the fight. We’d then see Pacquiao doing what he did last time by fighting hard only in the last 20 seconds of every round instead of the full three minutes like he used to.
Roach needs to take Pacquiao out at a slow gallop and keep him moving along slowly because he’s going to ruin it for the Filipino if he tries to whip into knocking Marquez out.
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