By Chris Williams: Trainer Freddie Roach is pretty confident that his fighter WBO welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao (56-5-2, 38 KOs) will be able to land his shots against defensive artist Chris Algieri (20-0, 8 KOs) in their fight on November 22nd at the Cotai Arena, Venetian Resort, Macao, Macao S.A.R., China.
Roach also predicting a knockout for Pacquiao in this fight despite the fact that he hasn’t knocked anyone out in 5 years. Roach is still faithfully predicting knockouts each time 35-year-old Pacquiao fights, and the Algieri fight is no exception.
It’s pretty clear that there won’t be a knockout in this fight. Roach obviously is predicting knockouts like he always does, but there’s no way that Pacquiao with his short 35-year-old legs is going to be able to catch up to Algieri often enough to score a knockout in this fight.
If Pacquiao tries to score a knockout by chasing Algieri all around the ring on November 22nd, we could see Pacquiao suffer a bad case of leg cramps. He tends to cramp up when he has to move a great deal, and believe me, Algieri is going to be making Pacquiao move.
“Algieri is very hittable. People don’t realize how fast [Pacquiao] is until they get in the ring with him, he does put his punches together very well,” Roach said to Rappler.com. “I think Algieri will get knocked out somewhere along the way.”
I don’t think Roach has fully come to terms with the fact that Algieri beat his fighter Ruslan Provodnikov. Roach has been saying that Algieri didn’t do enough to earn a decision win over Provodnikov last June when they faced each other.
Roach thinks that the reason why Provodnikov struggled against Algieri was because he was throwing one punch at a time instead of combinations. Roach says that Pacquiao will be throwing combinations when he fights Algieri instead of one shot at a time. That sounds good, but it’s not something that we’re likely going to see from Pacquiao because he doesn’t throw combinations against guys that move.
If you look at Pacquiao’s first fight against Tim Bradley, Pacquiao only had time enough to throw one shot at a time due to the constant movement that Bradley used in the fight. Algieri is going to do the same thing by staying on the move and leaving Pacquiao hitting air with his combinations.
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