Roach: Pacquiao is fighting better now than he has in a long time; we don’t need a tune-up

By Boxing News - 01/13/2013 - Comments

roach324By Chris Williams: Freddie Roach doesn’t want his fighter Manny Pacquiao to take a tune-up fight in April against whoever Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum digs up for him to fight. Roach thinks Pacquiao is beyond the need of tune-ups at this point in his career, and in fact he thinks he’s fighting better now than he has in ages.

Roach said to fighthub.tv “They’re talking about a fight in April in Macau right now, a tune-up with Manny. I really don’t want a tune-up right now. I don’t think a fighter like Pacquiao needs a tune-up fight. Manny was fighting the best fight I’ve seen him fight in a long time. We got caught in that fight but I still think it was a great performance.”

It was a great performance from Pacquiao? I don’t agree with Roach. How can it be a great performance when he was dropped twice by right hands from Juan Manuel Marquez and knocked completely out in the 6th round? I know Roach likes his fighters to go after their opponents and brawl with them, but in this case it was a really bad tactic. It was the wrong tool for the job.

Roach needed to have some better strategy for Pacquiao because he tried the old bum rushing method that Pacquiao used in the early part of his career when he was faster, more energetic, and smaller and fighting lesser opponents. It was the wrong plan for the Marquez fight and the results were devastating with Pacquiao knocked out in the clinical sense.

It’s hard to understand why Roach doesn’t see why it’s a good idea that Pacquiao take a tune-up bout rather than having rush straight into a fifth fight with Marquez. When you have a fighter that is knocked unconscious the way that Pacquiao was by Marquez, they sometimes get knocked out even easier in their next fights.

This is why it’s not a good idea to take a fighter that was blasted out and immediately put them back in with a really good fighter. That’s a good way to get them knocked out again, and it’s hard to believe that Roach doesn’t want to take the cautious approach with the Filipino.



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