By Chris Williams: Super middleweight contender Andre Dirrell thinks Floyd Mayweather Jr will beat Manny Pacquiao in their possible fight on May 2nd. Dirrell sees Mayweather’s elusiveness and ring intelligence as being too much for Pacquiao to handle once he gets him inside the ring.
The Mayweather-Pacquiao negotiations are still ongoing, but the news has been mostly positive now. This is the closest the two fighters have gotten to facing each other since their 2009 negotiations.
For those who may have forgotten, the negotiations blew apart after Mayweather asked Pacquiao to take random blood testing to check for performance enhancing drugs.
Rather than sticking it out to make the fight happen, Pacquiao and his promoter Bob Arum moved on to face Joshua Clottey. Yes, it was a huge missed opportunity for both fighters.
“I’m going with Mayweather though, man. The man is nothing short of perfection, man, and we all know perfection prevails. The boy is sharp, he’s elusive, he’s smart, you know what I’m saying, and he has the ultimate game plan,” Dirrell said via Fighthype.com.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCZl4ttMJFM
All it may take for Pacquiao to lose to Mayweather is for him to fall behind early in the fight and be put in a position of having to play catch-up. Pacquiao is already sloppy with his fighting style as it is, but once he gets in a position where he’s behind in the fight by four rounds or so, he’ll really be putting himself in a position where he’ll need to put the pressure on Mayweather in order to get back into the fight.
That’s when Pacquiao will leave himself open for all kinds of big shots from Mayweather. I can see the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight winding up a lot like the second fight between Mayweather and Marcos Maidana last September. Pacquiao could find himself literally chasing Mayweather around the ring and getting clipped over and over again with his pinpoint shots.
Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach has said that he knows how to plan for the Mayweather fight by having Pacquiao throw a lot of shots. Roach thinks Pacquiao can beat Mayweather by outworking him with a sheer high volume of punches thrown.
Unfortunately for Roach, he’s thinking of Mayweather being a stationary fighter like most of Pacquiao’s opponents. For some reason, Pacquiao is put in with guys that tend to stand directly in front of him like we saw with Brandon Rios, Miguel Cotto, Joshua Clottey, Shane Mosley, Antonio Margarito, and Tim Bradley.
Those guys were all perfect for Pacquiao, and he was able to take advantage of their lack of mobility by overwhelming them with shots. It was great match-making by Arum to put Pacquiao in with those guys, because he definitely struggles when he has to deal with mobility.
The only guy that used any kind of movement against Pacquiao was Bradley in their first fight in 2012. But for some reason Bradley chose to fight stationary against Pacquiao in their rematch in 2014.
Only Bradley knows why he chose to do that, because when you beat a fighter, you don’t change things up in the rematch by fighting their game.
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