By Chris Williams: Floyd Mayweather Jr. made his grand arrival on Tuesday at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada as part of the kickoff week for his fight against Manny Pacquiao on Saturday night, May 2nd at the MGM. Mayweather will be looking to bag Pacquiao’s scalp to add his 48th consecutive victory of his long 19-year pro career.
Mayweather figures that he’s the more intelligent fighter than the 36-year-old Pacquiao, and that will prove to be one of the keys to him beating the Filipino star. Mayweather simply sees himself as smarter and that extra brain power will take him to a victory in this important clash.
“I truly believe I’m a smarter fighter,” Mayweather said.
The thing is I don’t think too many boxing fans would disagree with Mayweather’s belief. They do see him as the smarter guy, and the better athlete. Pacquiao is seen by a lot of fans as a guy that mainly throws a lot of punches and moves around a lot in the ring, much of the time needlessly. The question for this fight is will Mayweather’s superior ring IQ be enough to overcome Pacquiao’s high volume punch output and his constant movement?
A lot of boxing fans are betting on Mayweather being able to completely negate Pacquiao’s high volume punch output simply by using movement to keep him from getting his shots off. If Pacquiao gets caught up in a fight where he’s missing 90 percent of his punches, he’s going to have a very hard time winning a decision. Even if he’s still landing a fair amount of shots just due to the sheer number of punches he’s throwing, he’s not going to win rounds if Mayweather is connecting with a much higher connect percentage. It could get really out of hand at some point with Mayweather dominating.
“It’s just work. Go out there and do my job,” Mayweather said about Pacquiao.
Mayweather literally doesn’t see the fight with Pacquiao as anything other than a case of him doing out to do his job. He doesn’t see Pacquiao as anything special because he’s sized him up and sees him as reckless smaller fighter who moves around a lot without thought, and who wastes a lot of energy.
Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach is going to need to keep it together mentally if/when the fight starts going bad for Pacquiao. If Roach is forced to think and come up with adjustments that Pacquiao needs to make to be competitive, Roach might give Pacquiao a lot of bad advice like the kind of he gave to him for his last fight against Juan Manuel Marquez.
If Pacquiao finds himself trailing in the first four rounds of the fight by a wide margin, Roach may light a fire under Pacquiao’s backside by telling him to charge Mayweather and go for a knockout. As such, we could be seeing a replay of the Pacquiao-Marquez 4 fight in which Pacquiao storms forwards towards Mayweather and gets knocked out with a perfectly timed right hand to the head.
Comments are closed.