By Chris Williams: Trainer Freddie Roach stubbornly still doesn’t think his fighter Manny Pacquiao (54-5-2, 38 KO’s) did anything really seriously wrong in his 6th round knockout loss to Juan Manuel Marquez (55-6-1, 40 KO’s) last weekend. Roach just chocks it up to Marquez landing a hard right hand from a really short distance with power that Pacquiao and Roach really weren’t expecting from the proud Mexican warrior.

Roach said after the fight “I thought we almost had him out. Get a little careless, and walked into a two-inch punch… He never saw it coming. If you watch the replay, it’s about a two-inch.”

It wasn’t quite that short of a punch but it definitely was a shot that didn’t travel very far, but I don’t believe that Pacquiao would have been able to take that punch even if he saw it coming. It was such a powerful shot that Pacquiao would have been on the canvas even if he saw it coming from a mile away. Marquez really got all of his body into that shot and it was perfect.

If you look at it in replay, Marquez cocked himself like a pistol as Pacquiao was coming forward and as soon as he was in the right distance, Marquez fired that huge right hand that dropped Pacquiao dead in his tracks. He fell like a little tree falling over after being cut down. I counted the time that he was out cold and it was close to two minutes. That’s a serious knockout and a dangerous one too.

You could see that Pacquiao was going to have problems in this fight because each time he got close to Marquez, he was hit with short punches with incredible power. I was pretty stunned by the power that Marquez was generating on his short punches because I’d never seen that kind of power from him before. His strength coach Angel Hernandez has really done a remarkable job of increasing Marquez’s strength with his various resistance exercises.

Marquez was much more explosive with every shot he threw in this fight. Even his body shots, you could see the power and he wasn’t throwing them with everything he had. I saw how Pacquiao lowered his arm and put in next to his side after getting hit by Marquez, as if he was trying to rub the pain away. It would have been interesting to see what Marquez could have done to Pacquiao if the two had fought on the inside for anything length of time. I think Marquez would have stopped Pacquiao with a body shot if the Filipino had elected to fight him in close.