Trainer Freddie Roach says that Manny Pacquiao is doing all he can to try and get a fight against WBA/WBC welterweight champion Floyd Mayweather Jr. Pacquiao has won 2 out of his last 4 fights in beating fellow Top Rank fighters Brandon Rios and Tim Bradley.
Pacquiao is now set to fight light welterweight Chris Algieri on November 22nd. If it wasn’t him, Pacquiao was going to fight Ruslan Provodnikov.
Roach recently said that Pacquiao would take the smaller money and would agree to the blood testing for the fight, which is what caused their initial Mayweather-Pacquiao negotiations to fall apart when they attempted to put a fight together in 2010. Mayweather agreed to a 50-50 deal at that time, but then the negotiations died after he asked for random blood testing to check for performance enhancing drugs.
“We’re doing everything we can to fight Mayweather,” Roach said to Radio Raheem about how Pacquiao is looking to get the Mayweather fight by fighting guys like Brandon Rios, Chris Algieri and Tim Bradley. “It’s really up to him at this point. The thing is we’re ready to go. We can work out the negotiations. Just say you want to fight us. Mayweather has never shown that he wants to fight Manny.”
I’m not sure that Pacquiao is fighting the big enough names right now. Instead of fighting 140 pounder like Algieri, why isn’t Pacquiao fighting guys like Keith Thurman, Shawn Porter, Kell Brook, Amir Khan, Erislandy Lara and Saul “Canelo” Alvarez. The guys that Pacquiao’s promoters Bob Arum is matching him up against leave a lot to be desired.
Roach says that Pacquiao is doing everything he can to get a fight against Mayweather, but how can Roach say that when Pacquiao is fighting guys like Rios, Bradley and Algieri. Bradley has no power and is quite fortunate that he beat Provodnikov. Algieri is a little known light welterweight, and Brandon Rios was coming off of a loss to Mike Alvarado when he fought Pacquiao last November.
It seems to me that Pacquiao needs some more solid wins under his belt before he can ask for a fight against Mayweather because the guys that he’s been fighting lately just aren’t big enough names.