By Michael Collins: Manny Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach is excited about all the flaws he’s seen in the game of Pacquiao’s June 9th opponent Timothy Bradley. Roach thinks Pacquiao will be able to exploit these flaws and punish Bradley and possibly get a stoppage in their fight at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Roach said this in their latest conference call: “I have watched a lot of tapes on his [Bradley] defense. We are going to take advantage of them.“
Roach said pretty much the same kinds of things about Pacquiao’s last opponent Juan Manuel Marquez, but it was Marquez who was taking advantage of all Pacquiao’s flaws, not the other way around. Pacquiao would have lost that fight had two of the judges not given him the fight against the opinions of a lot of boxing fans. Lately, Roach has been making a lot of excuses for Pacquiao’s performance in the Marquez fight, blaming it on family problems. You never like to see a trainer making excuses after a fight, because it looks bad. Some people will buy the excuses but it just sounds like a person who can’t acknowledge that Pacquiao has a lot of holes in his own game that ROACH needs to fix. At 33, Pacquiao probably isn’t going to be fixing too many of the holes unfortunately.
Roach says he’s got some secret plan to use to keep from Bradley ramming heads with Pacquiao when he’s looking to land his shots. Roach said “Yes, Bradley does come in head first. We have been working on how to nullify that.”
It’s pretty much going to be Pacquiao looking to jump from side to side in order to fight at angles. That kind of thing used to work for him when he was younger, but now he’s starting to experience leg cramps from the moving around, and he’s not able to do that. If Pacquiao tries to go back jumping from side to side in order to avoid Bradley’s head, he’ll likely end up with leg cramps sooner in the fight.