By Chris Williams: Former eight division world champion Manny Pacquiao is still slowed up from the after effects for an eye injury that he suffered a couple of weeks ago. Pacquiao hasn’t been able to spar like he previously did due to the injury to his right eye. Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach is hoping to get the 37-year-old back to full strength soon at his gym in General Santos City in the Philippines.
Pacquiao is training for his third fight against Tim Bradley on April 9 on HBO PPV at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. This is supposed to be the final fight of his series with Pacquiao, but you never know. If his promoter Bob Arum is able to convince him the continue his career, it’s always possible we could see a fourth fight between Pacquiao and Bradley.
Arum would like to match Pacquiao against his unbeaten would be star Terence Crawford this year. You can argue that Arum not only wants Pacuqiao to take that fight, but he NEEDS Pacquiao to fight Crawford in order to turn the 28-year-old American into a star. In that case, Pacquiao would likely be the equivalent of the old toothless lion for Crawford to rip apart to help build up his name.
Not so good … but not bad either,” Roach said about Pacquiao to philboxing.com. “We have a little bit of catching up to do in this coming week, particularly in the sparring aspect of our program,” Roach said.
Roach is interested in getting another sparring partner to help Pacquiao train. They’ve been using lightweight Ghislain Maduma and light welterweight Dierry Jean as the sparring partners, but Roach is hoping to add another guy soon.
Roach said “Maduma though is doing well, so far,” but just in case, it would be better if we have two sparring partners before we leave for Los Angeles.”
I’m not sure that an additional sparring partner will help Pacquiao out. If anything, he probably needs to back off from sparring completely in order to rest up from his eye injury and to prevent from suffering an additional injury of some sort. Roach needs to take it easy with the aging Pacquiao, because the last thing he needs is to have him reinjure his recently operated on right shoulder. Pacquiao suffered a torn rotator cuff last May during or before his fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr.
I’m not sure when precisely the injury really occurred because there’s been talk of the shoulder injury occurring during training camp for the Mayweather fight, and then there was even talk of it occurring many years before. At this point all I know is Pacquiao had an injured shoulder for the Mayweather fight, and it kept him from fighting at the top level.
The surgery was a success for Pacquiao’s shoulder, and now he’s back training going into a major fight without a tune-up. Roach should realize that Pacquiao should be brought along slowly. He’s going to get hurt again if he’s not careful, and then we’ll either see Pacquiao go into the third Bradley fight with another injury, or the fight will be postponed.
Comments are closed.