By Chris Williams: It’s down to just 35 days before Floyd Mayweather Jr (47-0, 26 KOs) and Manny Pacquiao (57-5-2, 38 KOs) meet up in their huge mega-fight on May 2nd in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. The two fighters have picked the perfect month to fight in Vegas before the temperatures really start heating up. Mayweather wants to stay unbeaten and add Pacquiao’s scalp to his resume.
Pacquiao pretty much needs a win over Mayweather to halt the freefall decline in his own pay-per-view numbers, which have going downwards ever since he was knocked clean out by Juan Manuel Marquez in 2012. A loss for Pacquiao against Mayweather will likely be catastrophic for the Filipino star’s career, especially if Mayweather whips him bad.
A close loss for Pacquiao might be able to keep him from losing fans, because there’s a possibility that some people might cry robbery. But I have a feeling this fight isn’t going to be a close one, not with Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach talking about Pacquiao’s game plan for the fight being the old in and out style that he’s been using since he first turned pro in 1995.
Pacquiao needs something different for him to be competitive with Mayweather, because that tired old fighting style of his has likely already been totally solved by Mayweather in his mind. Additionally, you can bet that Mayweather has had his sparring partners mimicking Pacquiao’s in and out attacking style in order to get him ready for the style on May 2nd.
Mayweather obviously knows that Pacquiao and Roach won’t do anything to change up their fighting style for the fight. They’re going to use the same style they’ve been using for ages and that’s going to be a potential problem for Pacquiao. He can’t continue to use his same style of fighting if he wants to compete against Mayweather, because he obviously already knows how to defeat Pacquiao’s in and out style of fighting.
If Juan Marquez was able to time Pacquiao each time he would jump in to try and land a shot, then Mayweather is going to be able to nail him with shots each time he tries this old trick.
“I could see fear in Floyd’s eyes,” Pacquiao said via Philboxing.com about his stare down with Mayweather during their recent press conference. “His downfall looms on the horizon. This coming May 2, God will deliver him into my hands. Many times I’d been into street fights using bare knuckles. I was never scared and I stood my ground.”
Whether Mayweather is scared or not matters little. Some of the most confident fighters wind up getting battered and beaten to a pulp in their fights. Fighters with big egos tend to get beaten badly, because they don’t recognize a dangerous opponent where they should feel some fear.
If Pacquiao is bragging about how he doesn’t feel fear, then that tells you that he’s overlooking the potential if him not only getting beaten, but getting clowned in the process. Pacquiao needs to take the fight with Mayweather very seriously if he wants to have a chance of winning it.
If he’s feeling as cocky as he did going into his fights against Top Rank stable fighters like Brandon Rios and Tim Bradley, then we could see Pacquiao get brought down to earth on May 2nd. Right now he’s speaking like a fighter whose feet aren’t firmly on the ground. I think this could go really badly for Pacquiao if he doesn’t look at what could happen to him in this fight.
It would be good for Pacquiao if he signed on an additional trainer for the Mayweather fight so that he can be given a different style of fighting. I don’t have much faith in Roach being able to come up with anything different than the style Pacquiao has been using for the past 20 years of his career. I just don’t see it.
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