By Dan Ambrose: Trainer Freddie Roach wants to back Manny Pacquiao’s training time off in the last part of his training camp in order to keep him from overdoing it for his fight next month against Brandon Rios in Macao, China.
Perhaps because of the sting of his back to back losses in his last two fights, Pacquiao has been training at a feverish pace to get into shape for the Rios bout. While it’s been said that Pac is looking great, he may end up getting diminishing returns if he keeps working out at this level. There’s just a month to go before the fight and Roach doesn’t want to use the 34-yard-old Pacquiao up before the fight.
I think I have to hold him back a little bit,” Roach said to the Manila Standard. “We need to slow him down and make the pace a little slower. It is very difficult to hold Manny Pacquiao back but sometimes we’ve got to hold on and tackle him but he knows.”
Roach knows that Pacquiao could end up drained by the time he gets in the ring to face Rios, and if that happens the chances of him losing will be quite high. Boxing fans won’t understand that Pacquiao was over-trained and they’ll just think that he’s a shot fighter. Many of the fans won’t be eager to purchase Pacquiao’s expensive fights in the future if he takes yet another loss.
Pacquiao was stopped in the 6th round by Juan Manuel Marquez last December. Before that fight, Pacquiao was out-boxed by Tim Bradley in losing by a 12 round decision last year in June. The same way that Marquez was out-boxed by Bradley, Pacquiao was out-boxed by Bradley. That’s one of the reasons why the more stationary Brandon Rios was picked out to fight Pacquiao, because he’ll stand in front of him for 12 rounds looking to slug it out and making it easy for Pacquiao to land his power shots. With Bradley, he’d move around and limit Pacquiao’s ability to land his shots.
Pacquiao has had a lot of time to rest up and recover from his knockout loss, but there are still a lot of questions whether he’s recovered from the affects of the KO. He’s wearing head gear in his sparring sessions and his sparring partners have large boxing gloves on in order to limit the amount of damage from the impact of their punches. But on November 23rd, Pacquiao won’t have head gear on and he’s going to be getting hit with light gloves that will test whether he’s truly recovered from the KO loss.
It’s going to be interesting to see how Pacquiao handles getting hit hard by Rios for 12 rounds or for however long the fight lasts. Pacquiao has a chance to score a knockout over Rios as well, but it would be a first for him. Rios has never been stopped in his career and he’s known for his ability to take a big shot. However, every fighter reaches a point where they get hurt and are unable to continue on. We could see that with Rios if Pacquiao is able to roll away the years and fight like he once did years ago.
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