By Scott Gilfoid: Ricky Hatton (45-2, 32 KO’s) has revealed that he was weight drained for his fight against Manny Pacquiao in 2009 that he lost by a 2nd round knockout. Hatton says that he was weak before the fight from making weight.

Hatton said to the telegraph.co.uk “I was weight drained. I was absolutely dead. It wasn’t hard for me to have been knocked out by the best in the world by Pacquiao.”

Okay, I’ll buy that excuse by Hatton. He had looked incredibly plump before he started his training camp for the Pacquiao fight, so it’s not hard to imagine that he took off too much in too fast of a manner by treating the training camp as kind of a fat farm instead of what it was intended as a camp to get ready for an important fight.

To be sure, Hatton took off a ton of weight for the Pacquiao fight, but here we are in similar circumstances as Hatton approaches his fight against former WBA welterweight champion Vyacheslav Senchenko on Saturday night at the Manchester Arena. Hatton reportedly took off 70 pounds to get ready for this fight on Saturday and that’s got to be even more than he lost for the Pacquiao fight.

With that kind of weight it doesn’t matter if he lost it slowly or not, it’s simply too much weight for him to be anything close to what he once was. When you’re talking about losing 1/3 of your body weight to get down to 147 that’s just asking for trouble. I can’t imagine losing 70 pounds and then getting in the ring to fight a world class fighter, even one that was recently spanked by Paulie Malignaggi like Senchenko was.

Don’t be surprised if you see Hatton take a beating in this fight and visit the canvas two or three times before it’s over. It’s one thing sparring in training camp with head gear and over-sized gloves but when you take aging fighter that has lost a ton of weight and throw him in the ring against the real thing, bad things happen.