By Brad Cronick: Frustrated with his inability to crack Juan Manuel Marquez’s tough counter punching style, Manny Pacquiao is using a little psychology on Marquez by urging him to stand and trade with him on Saturday night if he wants to prove that deserves to be the better man.
It’s obviously a trick because Pacquiao is asking Marquez to give up what he does best and to fight Pacquiao’s game, the only game he really knows. Marquez would be crazy to fall into that trap because he’s not that kind of a fighter to just stand and throwing shots back and forth.
“If he’ll fight toe-to-toe, and exchange punches. I think he needs to do that because he’s been claiming he won the fight, and you just back off, back off. It’s not good for the people…it’s contradictory to his claiming he won the fight.”
In other words, Pacquiao doesn’t want Marquez to box, and he doesn’t believe boxers win. Unfortunately, boxers do win. We saw that last Saturday night with WBA junior middleweight champion Austin Trout out-boxing slugger Miguel Cotto, and you can make a pretty good argument that we saw Marquez beat Pacquiao in their three previous fights by out-boxing him, despite the fact that the judges working those fights failed to give Marquez the win.
Marquez probably isn’t going to just mindlessly look to stand and trade with Pacquiao in the center of the ring and forget all the things he’s learned over the years. If Pacquiao wanted that kind of opponent he should have pushed his promoter Bob Arum to make the fight Brandon Rios this Saturday instead of on April 20th. But Marquez isn’t going to fight a primitive fight because he’s technician and he learned the game early. He wasn’t someone that got over based on activity and fast hands like Pacquiao. Marquez is a well-schooled fighter, and he’s not going to play Pacquiao’s game just because he wants him to or needs him to.