Pacquiao doubts Bradley can change fighting style

By Boxing News - 01/11/2016 - Comments

Manny PacquiaoBy Allan Fox: Manny Pacquiao will be facing Tim Bradley for a third time in three months from now on April 9 at the MGM Grand, in Las Vegas, Nevada. According to rappler.com, Pacquiao is saying that his promoter Bob Arum was the one who selected Bradley for the third fight and not him.

Pacquiao says he didn’t care who he fought. He just wanted to fight. If this is true that Arum selected Pacquiao’s fight with Bradley then that runs counter to the belief that it was Pacquiao supposedly being the one that hand-picked the 32-year-old Bradley for the fight.

“Pacquiao says it was his promoter Top Rank who picked Bradley,” Ryan Songalia said to rappler.com.

“I don’t care. I don’t care,” Pacquiao said.

If it was Arum who picked Bradley, then he was doing Pacquiao a favor, because many fans felt that Arum would select Terence Crawford for Pacquiao to fight because he needs the fight more than Bradley, and has the most potential of anyone other than Felix Verdejo in Arum’s Top Rank stable to one day before a pay-per-view star.

Bradley now has trainer Teddy Atlas in working his corner, and some fans believe that Atlas will change Bradley’s style enough to where he’ll beat the 37-yesr-old Pacquiao this time without controversy. Pacquiao doesn’t think Bradley can be anything other than the fighter he was in the past.

“He can only be Timothy Bradley. I know his style,” Pacquiao said. “I’m not old. I’m still young. I just have to focus on my other job to help the people.”

What Pacquiao says is true. Bradley cannot change his style of fighting no matter what his new trainer Teddy Atlas has him trying to do. Atlas can talk a good game and promote the fight better than most trainers, but his game plan won’t bring anything new out in Bradley’s game that hasn’t already been explored before by him in his previous two fights against Pacquiao. Bradley has tried slugging with Pacquiao. It didn’t work. Bradley tried moving around the ring. That didn’t work either.

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All it did was lead to Bradley injuring his foot and calf. If Bradley sets up shop in front of Pacquiao to try and throw body shots like he did in his last fight against Brandon Rios, it’s going to leave Bradley open to getting hit with counter shots.

Bradley has been concussed before and dropped in his fight with Ruslan Provodnikov in 2013. Standing in front of Pacquiao won’t work for Bradley, because he’s too easy to hit, and he gets hurt too much. Atlas will very likely have Bradley moving around the ring for 12 rounds, hoping that he can steal a decision like he did in the first fight. I don’t think that’s a recipe for success. This is going to be Pacquiao’s last fight of his career, and the judges know that. They’re not going to let Pacquiao lose a fight in which his opponent is stalling out the fight by moving for three minutes of every round. The only way Bradley beats Pacquiao is if he gets in the trenches and out-slugs him, and IO don’t think he can do that.



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