Pacquiao beats Crawford at 147, says Sanchez

By Boxing News - 07/26/2016 - Comments

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By Chris Williams: If Manny Pacquiao (58-6-2, 38 KOs) makes the mistake of agreeing to fight WBC/WBO light welterweight champion Terence Crawford (29-0, 20 KOs) at 140, he’ll lose the fight, according to Gennady “GGG” Golovkin’s trainer Abel Sanchez. However, Sanchez thinks it’ll be so hard for Pacquiao to drop the needed weight to get to 140 that he’ll end up weakened in the process of dropping the weight. On the flipside, Sanchez says that Pacquiao gets Crawford to move up to 147 to fight him, then Pacquiao will win.

“I think Terence beats Manny at 140 pounds because Manny would kill himself to get down there, no matter what he says,” said Sanchez to the dailynews.com. ”But I think Manny wins at 147.”

Pacquiao should tell Crawford that if he wants to fight him, then he needs to come up to welterweight and beat a top name like Errol Spence Jr. first.

Pacquiao shouldn’t agree to move down to 140 to fight in a weight class that he hasn’t fought in almost a decade. That would be an insane move by him if he did that. Pacquiao is the star here, not Crawford.

There’s no need for Pacquiao to act subservient to Crawford when the guy only two names on his resume in terms of decent quality opposition. I doubt that Bob Arum would go along with Pacquiao making Crawford prove himself to earn the fight against him. Arum would have to know from watching Crawford last Saturday night that a guy like Errol Spence or Keith Thurman would walk right through him and knock him out within six rounds. However, there’s nothing wrong with Pacquiao insisting that Crawford earn a fight against him by proving himself against Spence or Thurman, because beating Viktor Postol means nothing at all. Postol looked totally clueless last Saturday night against Crawford.

Roach was begging Postol to stop following Crawford around the ring and instead cut off the ring. Postol didn’t know how to stop Crawford from running.

“I don’t have to go anywhere,” Crawford said. “I think people should come to me.”

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It’s true that Crawford doesn’t have to go anywhere as far as him moving from the 140lb weight class, but that’s obviously going to prevent him from getting the big names like Pacquiao to fight him. The 140lb division is a dead division. The top guys don’t want to move down in weight to a dead division to fight a runner/non-PPV attraction like Crawford. There’s no upside in moving down to 140 to fight Crawford. I can see Arum working on trying to convince Pacquiao to move down to 140lb so that he can fight Crawford. After all, if Crawford beats Pacquiao he has a chance of getting a little more popular from the vision, which would help Arum’s Top Rank stable.

I think the popularity would be fleeting through without Crawford moving to 147 and taking on the fighters that boxing fans care about. Crawford isn’t going to be able to take advantage of win over Pacquiao by turning around and continuing to fight obscure guys at 140. The casual boxing fans aren’t familiar with guys like Postol, Thomas Dulorme, Hank Lundy, Dierry Jean and Raymundo Beltran. Those are the guys that Crawford has eaten up the last two years of his career fighting.

Crawford, 28, surprised a lot of boxing fans last Saturday night with him saying that Pacquiao would need to come down to 140 pounds if he wants to fight him. Crawford could have been emboldened by his 12 round unanimous decision win over Viktor Postol in their fight last Saturday night at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. I can’t imagine Crawford’s promoter Bob Arum being too pleased with Crawford trying to call the shots with Pacquiao when he’s not even a pay-per-view fighter.

The only reason that Crawford’s fight against Postol ended up on pay-per-view was because HBO didn’t have an available opening on their schedule for him. That kind of tells you something about Crawford when HBO doesn’t have a date for him. If this was Gennady Golovkin, I’m guessing that HBO finds a date for the highly popular fighter.

Crawford doesn’t have the pull to pressure Pacquiao to fight him at 140. If Pacquiao agrees to drain down to fight Crawford at light welterweight, then that would be him being kind to him by giving him the advantage even though he doesn’t rate. Crawford can say that he’s the WBC/WBO light welterweight belt holder, so Pacquiao must come down to fight him for his belts. I think it would be a waste of time for Pacquiao to do that though, because boxing fans don’t care about titles that much nowadays. They’re focused on wanting to see the popular and exciting fighters. Belts no longer matter like they used to because of all the weight classes being watered down with multiple titles.

I think it’s quite possible that Crawford won’t get the fight against Pacquiao on November 5, because I think Arum is going to have Pacquiao fight WBO welterweight champion Jessie Vargas next. That’s a better fight for Pacquiao for a number of reasons. First of all, Pacquiao won’t have to drain down in weight like he would in fighting Crawford. Pacquiao has been fighting at welterweight for the past eight years since beating Oscar De La Hoya in 2008. Secondly, Vargas has a more exciting style of fighting than Crawford in my view, because he’s not a counter puncher and he doesn’t run around the ring to avoid getting hit. Vargas doesn’t do a lot of holding and hitting in the clinch. The most important thing that Vargas has going for him is his ability to attract a lot of fans. Vargas is a good trash talker, and he’s animated. He laughs easily and has a lot of interesting things to say in interviews.

I think Vargas would do a lot of the heavy lifting in the promotions of a fight against Pacquiao. That would take a load off the shoulders of the 84-year-old Arum, who did most of the hard work in promoting the Crawford vs. Postol fight in terms of giving interesting interviews to the media. Arum looked pretty well exhausted by the time the Crawford-Postol fight took place last Saturday. I’m sure Arum wouldn’t mind being able to take a backseat for the Pacquiao vs. Vargas promotion and have Vargas and Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach do all the hard work when it comes to interviews.