Trainer Freddie Roach is playing Nostradamus once again in predicting one of Manny Pacquiao’s knockout wins. In this case, Roach sees Pacquiao scoring a knockout over WBO welterweight champion Tim Bradley (31-0, 12 KO’s) by the 6th round on April 12th at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.
What’s different from this time compared to the last time Pacquiao fought Bradley? Well, Roach says that Pacquiao will be fighting for the full 3 minutes of every round and that he’s going to keep the pressure on the 5’6” Bradley the whole time without giving him any space whatsoever. In other words, he’s going to stay on top of the 30-year-old Bradley the entire time without giving him rest breaks like he did in their fight in 2012.
“If we fight at a fast pace like that we’ll be able to stop Bradley somewhere during the middle rounds along the way.”
You notice how Roach says “if” now instead of “we will” fight at a fast pace? The reason is because Pacquiao hasn’t scored a knockout in ages since his questionable 12th round stoppage win over Miguel Cotto in 2009. With that kind of a time gap between knockouts, it’s pretty clear that something is wrong with Pacquiao’s game that doesn’t seem to be capable of fixing.
Roach thinks it’s a situation where Pacquiao has been showing too much compassion to his opponents. But we’ve also heard all kinds of other excuses such as leg cramps, marital problems, basketball games, and late night phone calls getting in way of Pacquiao being at his best. At some point you just got to figure that the knockouts are probably going to be a thing of the past and just forget about them.
Pacquiao has an open mind about the fight, as he doesn’t care if he gets a knockout or not. But Roach seems to badly want to score a knockout in this fight, as if a KO win will somehow erase the stain of Pacquiao’s previous loss to Bradley. It wasn’t just Pacquiao’s loss, it was also Roach’s defeat because he couldn’t come up with the game plan to turn the fight around when Pacquiao ran out of gas in the 2nd half of the fight with Bradley in 2012.
