Pacquiao v Horn

By Allan Fox:

Manny Pacquiao will be fighting next Saturday night against Jeff Horn on ESPN on July 1 at the Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane, Australia. This fight is not on pay-per-view. The fight will be in front of 55,000 mostly Australians in a sold out stadium. Pacquiao is the visitor against a welterweight contender that is still unproven.

Horn (16-0-1, 11 KOs) will make himself known against the 38-year-old Pacquiao (59-6-2, 38 KOs). This will be Horn’s coming out party. The July 1 start time for the Pacquiao-Horn fight on ESPN and ESPN Deportes is at 10:00 p.m. ET. It’s been a while since Pacquiao was televised on regular non-PPV television. The last time he fought on regular TV was in 2005.

Horn is rated #1 by the World Boxing Organization at welterweight. This is one of the curious moves the WBO has made in terms of ranking fighters that have done very little in recent years. Horn’s best wins were against 43-year-old Randall Bailey and 38-year-old Ali Funeka. Horn visited the canvas in both fights in getting dropped by the two older fighters.

“Just bash the bloke in close,” said Fenech to the Courier Mail. “It’s no more Mister nice Guy now. I’m not saying break the rules but you have to rough Manny up. Jeff, do everything to hurt him in close. Twist him, twist his knees, use your weight advantage, bully him, bang your shoulder into him. Manny can punch at a distance, Jeff, Close the distance. Stay on his chest and make him feel all of his 38 years.”

The WBO was impressed with Horn enough to rank him No.1 At number 2, the WBO has Lucas Matthysse, a fighter who hasn’t fought in 2 years since being stopped by Viktor Postol. It would make a little more sense if someone with notable recent wins like Shawn Porter would be ranked at the top of the WBO’s rankings instead of the likes of Horn and Matthysse.

Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum has taken him in a different direction since his loss to Floyd Mayweather Jr. in 2015. Instead of ramping the Pacquiao up to increase his popularity, he seems to have ramped him down with fights against Jessie Vargas, Tim Bradley and now Jeff Horn. Net effect is Pacquiao’s PPV numbers have dropped off, and his fight with the 29-year-old Horn is on free TV on ESPN.

READ Pacquiao and Jeff Horn on Boxnation
If this was the intention by Pacquiao’s promoter, then he’s done a great job. It’s hard to believe a promoter would move their fighter downwards instead of upwards. Mayweather is fighting Conor McGregor on Showtime PPV on August 26 and he’s going to be making over $100 million. There’s no word what Pacquiao’s payday will be for his fight against Horn.

If Pacquiao can make a lot of money from the Australian PPV, as well as the ticket sales, then you can consider this a good move by Pacquiao’s promoter. However, Pacquiao can probably make better money if he started facing some of the more popular fighters in the welterweight division so that his fights would bring in better numbers on PPV than his last two fights.

Pacquiao vs. Jessie Vargas brought in 300,000 buys on PPV in the States. Pacquiao vs. Tim Bradley 3 brought in 400,000 buys. There was a time in the past in 2012 and 2014 when Pacquiao-Bradley was able to bring in over 800,000 buys. I guess there are only so many times the boxing public is willing to pay to see the same match-up. Pacquiao’s promoter probably should have thought about that before he made the Pacquiao-Bradley 3 fight.

Former world champion Jeff Fenech believes the best way for Horn to deal Pacquiao a defeat would be to rough him up badly on the inside. Horn isn’t seen as inside fighter. If he decides to take the fight to the inside to maul Pacquiao, it could work against him.

Horn has respectable power and good boxing skills. It sounds like Fenech wants him to abandon all that in hopes of getting the better of Pacquiao by turning the fight into an ugly mauling contest in close. I don’t think that approach is going to work. Pacquiao is strong fighter. Horn might come up empty if he tries to rough Pacquiao up. But that game plan might work in tiring Pacquiao out.

It’s something that hasn’t been tried yet against Pacquiao. No one that Pacquiao has fought has tried to rough him up in the last 12 years. Ricky Hatton attempted to get in close and throw body shots, but Pacquiao destroyed him quickly. That wasn’t much of a fight. However, Hatton didn’t rough Pacquiao up the way he did against Kostya Tszyu by wrestling him, and hitting him with low blows.

READ Manny Pacquiao vs. Jeff Horn to be televised on ESPN on July 1
Pacquiao was at the top of his game when he fought Hatton in 2009 and stopped him in the 2nd round. It probably wouldn’t have mattered what approach Hatton used in the fight. He was going to be over-matched by Pacquiao.

Pacquiao will be looking for win No.60 of his long 22-year pro career when he fights Horn next Saturday. Pacquiao retired briefly after beating Bradley last year in April in their third fight. Pacquiao was elected into the senate in the Philippines, which is a full time job. It’s a 6-year term. It was thought that there would be little chance for Pacquiao to continue boxing due to the time requirement in his senatorial position, but somehow he’s found time to continue fighting.

Pacquiao came out of retirement last November to beat one of his promoter’s fighters in Jessie Vargas by a 12 round decision. At the time, Vargas was the WBO welterweight champion. The win for Pacquiao gave him the WBO belt, which he’ll be defending next Saturday. Pacquiao’s fight with Horn will be his first fight in 2017.

It’s unclear whether Pacquiao will sit for the remainder of the year after that or if he’ll return to the ring. Pacquiao’s promoter hasn’t nailed down an opponent for next fight, but it could be Terence Crawford if he gets his way. Crawford is with the same promotional outfit as Pacquiao. Matthysse might be a possibility as well, as he’s now the No.2 fighter in the WBO’s rankings. That’s a fight that would be perfect for Pacquiao, because he does well against brawlers.

The guys that Pacquiao has problems with are the boxers like Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Tim Bradley. The money Pacquiao made for fights against those guys was obviously too good for him to turn down. But those were no good match-ups for Pacquiao in terms of bringing excitement to the boxing fans. Pacquiao-Matthysse will be an interesting fight if his promoters at Top Rank are willing to make that fight instead of having Pacquiao fight another guy from that promotional company.

“In all of my years of boxing, I have never been as motivated and fired up as [for] this fight,” Manny said to The Courier Mail. “My team is very happy with my preparation. I am looking forward to this and I will be going home as world champion.”

READ ESPN to Exclusively Air Manny Pacquiao - Jeff Horn Fight Live From Brisbane Australia July 1
Pacquiao likes the idea of fighting in front of a large stadium full of boxing fans. Hopefully, Pacquiao doesn’t get psyched out by fighting in front of a large pro-Horn crowd, because he’s going to be the visiting fighter. The fans are going to be cheering for Horn throughout the fight. Pacquiao is usually the guy the fans are cheering for. It’ll be a different story in this fight.

Pacquiao needs to take the crowd out of the picture as fast as possible on Saturday night to keep Horn from getting energized and picking up momentum. Horn is considerably younger and bigger than the 5’6 ½” Pacquiao. That size and youth could make it tough on Pacquiao if Horn gets confident inside the ring.

Pacquiao hasn’t had a knockout since his 12th round stoppage win over Miguel Cotto in 2009. Horn is probably the best bet for Pacquiao to get a knockout in the short term.

If Pacquiao attacks Horn in a sustained manner, he might be able to get him out. The problem that Pacquiao has had in his KO dry spell is he’s not attacking his opponents aggressively enough for him to knock them out. The way that Pacquiao was getting knockouts earlier in his career was by him throwing a lot of punches in a sustained manner. He went away from that after his win over Cotto. It could be that Pacquiao wasn’t comfortable with the punishment that he had to take in going for knockouts.

If you look at middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin, he frequently gets hit a lot while going for knockouts. That’s the price a knockout artist has to pay for him to keep knocking guys out. There are exceptions to that rule of having to take punishment to get a knockout.

If a fighter has one-punch power like Adonis Stevenson or former world champion Julian Jackson, then they can get knockouts without getting hit a lot. Pacquiao doesn’t possess that type of power. He needs to batter his opponents with a lot of shots over the course of his fights before he finally knocks them out. Pacquiao will likely need to hit Horn a lot each round before he eventually stops him on Saturday night.