Once again, Pacquiao is set to face a ‘high risk’ opponent in Joshua Clottey. As expected, he is fully focused on the fight and doing well in training since he had kept himself in shape. In an interview with Lem Satterfield for Fanhouse.com, Roach showed confidence in his fighter and predicted that Pacquiao will be the first one to knock out Clottey.
In the same article, Roach provided a hint on what strategy might be utilize in the fight against Clottey. Roach alluded that they plan to use angles and movement to confuse the challenger en route to a convincing victory in a fight that might mirror Pacquiao’s fight against Oscar.
Joshua Clottey is a big welterweight with solid skills and might prove to be a tougher challenge for Pacquiao than Oscar based on his youth and size. They are completely different boxers, but both do share similar traits. Much like Oscar, Clottey needs to get his feet set in order to throw punches and that will be difficult when Pacquiao rarely stays in one place and will throw punches in the midst of darting in and out and side to side.
In addition, similarly to Oscar, he has a tendency to be too passive as far as throwing punches is concerned and that can spell disaster against an aggressive and athletic fighter such as Pacquiao. That’s one of the reason that I always thought Pacquiao had a great chance in beating Mayweather Jr.
You cannot rely too much on defense and throw only one or two punches at a time when fighting Pacquiao since he’s not your typical ’slugger’. He’s extremely athletic and his fast twitch muscles allow him to put himself in a great position to throw his patented hooks and straight lefts very quickly. That was one of the main factors in the fight against Cotto. The Puerto Rican found it difficult to time Pacquiao when the latter simultaneously jumped while throwing punches because of the explosive manner that he does it and thus found himself defenseless from Pacquiao’s constant assault.
Also Clottey does not use his height to his advantage most of the time because of his tendency to fight in a crouching position with his head forward. So he will be vulnerable to Pacquiao’s counter punches the same way De La Hoya was.
It looks like Coach Freddie ‘Nostradamus’ Roach might again be proven right as Pacquiao’s seems to be headed to another ‘Golden’ victory. This fight will certainly be entertaining as both fighters are expected to fight, but Clottey’s skills aren’t versatile enough to upset the Pacman unless he tags him with an unexpected power shot. Of course the ‘expected’ doesn’t always happen in boxing, which was the reason most of us still watched Floyd’s fights against low risk opponents and the same reason most of us will watch this one.
Source: boxing.fighthype.com
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