By Allan Fox: Trainer Freddie Roach is inviting trouble by daring WBA/WBC 147 pound champion Floyd Mayweather Jr. (47-0, 26 KOs) to come out fast on Saturday night looking to score a quick knockout against his fighter WBO welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao (57-5-2, 38 KOs) in their fight at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Roach, 55, is betting that Pacquiao will be able to take whatever big shots that Mayweather lands and get the better of him. In fact, Roach doesn’t believe that Mayweather will be able to land his right hand and left hook power shots on Pacquiao.
Roach is so confident that his game plan that he’s put together for the Filipino fighter will be so good that he won’t be getting hit at all by Mayweather. Indeed, Roach brought in a number of Mayweather-like sparring partners during training camp and those fighters weren’t able to do much against the 36-year-old Pacquiao. Roach’s lab experiment has worked as far as he’s concerned, and now he wants to try Pacquiao with the real thing in Mayweather.
“Floyd has put on extra muscle and can punch when he wants to. So I hope he chooses to come out in the early rounds and tries to knock us out,” Roach said via Skysports.com. “Floyd will be looking to land that big overhand right, which was kind of a sucker shot, a shot fighters like Manny shouldn’t be hit with.”
It’s difficult to imagine Mayweather not landing his right hand during the 12 round bout. No matter how confident Roach is in Pacquiao’s defensive and overall boxing skills, it’s going to be very difficult for him to be able to elude Mayweather’s right hand and left hook for the full 12 rounds. If Pacquiao is going to be putting pressure on Mayweather like Roach has been hinting about, then it’s pretty much academic that Pacquiao will be eating a lot of shots in this fight each time he charges forward.
Pacquiao is no longer the hardest guy to hit any more. If you take away the Rios and Algieri fights, Pacquiao was getting nailed plenty by Tim Bradley. Algieri and Rios were simply too low level to do anything with Pacquiao. Those were more tune-up type fights and not a case of Pacquiao fighting a 1st tier fighter. But Mayweather will have the talent to land his shots against Pacquiao on Saturday night regardless of how good his defense is, and we’ll see if it works out well for the Filipino fighter.
Talking about Pacquiao’s past knockout against Juan Manuel Marquez, Roach said “It was a bad knockout against Marquez, he was down for a long time. I was worried but when we got back in the gym there was no change, he wasn’t gun shy. Manny knows that knockouts are a part of boxing,” said Roach, a seven-time trainer of the year. “If you don’t want to get knocked out, go do something else.”
It is a good sign that Pacquiao hasn’t been gun-shy since the knockout loss to Marquez. It was a case of him getting hit by a punch that he didn’t see coming. Mayweather doesn’t have that kind of punching power in his arsenal of punches so Pacquiao might be okay on Saturday as long as he doesn’t do anything stupid like run straight into one of Mayweather’s shots.
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