By Chris Williams: Guessing who the winner will be for this Saturday’s fight between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao has many boxing fans stumped. In most cases, the fans don’t know which of these two fighters to pick.
The problem is that most of the fans that are suddenly taking an interest in the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight are what you call casual fans. They don’t know much about the sport, so it’s not surprising why they don’t know which of the two will wind up as the winner on Saturday night at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.
It’s an easy choice for Mayweather’s trainer/father Floyd Mayweather Sr. He sees Pacquiao, 36, as offering up nothing that would give him any chance of winning the fight.
“Whatever happens on Saturday, it’s going to be one-sided. Pacquiao is going to sleep,” Mayweather Sr. said. “I’m a trainer, I know what’s going on with fighters.”
While some would dismiss Floyd Sr. as being biased due to him being Mayweather Jr’s father and trainer, you can’t entirely rule out the fight being a one-sided affair that ends in a knockout because Pacquiao was knocked out in 2012 by Juan Manuel Marquez. Besides that, Pacquiao has only fought one good fighter in the past six years in Marquez. T
he rest of the fighters Pacquiao has fought have been middle of the road opponents like Shane Mosley, Chris Algieri, Brandon Rios, Joshua Clottey, Antonio Margarito and Tim Bradley. Those are not great fighters in this day and age. Those are all B and C-level fighters. What we do know is Pacquiao lost to Marquez the last time he fought him. We know that Mayweather easily beat Marquez when he fought him in 2009. Therefore, it would seem that Mayweather will beat Pacquiao just based on how well he did against Marquez and how poorly Pacquiao did against the same fighter.
Floyd Sr. sees weakness when he looks at Pacquiao. He doesn’t think he can punch, and he sees him as a reckless fighter just as Mayweather Jr. does. Floyd Sr. doesn’t understand all the wasted movement that Pacquiao makes in the way he’s constantly hoping around and moving in a directionless way around the ring. Floyd Sr. thinks that Pacquiao is going to run into one of Mayweather’s shots on Saturday night, and this in turn will increase the power in Mayweather’s shots to lethal proportions to where he’ll score a knockout just as Marquez did.
If Pacquiao falls behind early in the fight like he did against Marquez in 2012, I can definitely see Mayweather knocking him out because Pacquiao will fight with a lot of desperation and will be even more reckless than he normally is. While it’s exciting for the boxing fans to watch a reckless fighter like Pacquiao to demolish the type of opposition that his promoter Bob Arum has been feeding him in the last six years, you can’t use a primitive fighting style like that against an expert fighter like Mayweather Jr. without paying for it big time.
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