By Rob Smith: In an utterly useless exercise the WBO put together a five-man panel to review the recent fight between Manny Pacquiao and Tim Bradley. At the end of their review the panel came to the conclusion that Pacquiao should have won the fight against Bradley.
This is all subjective stuff you must understand because I’m sure you could pick another panel that would different results, but whatever the case, they had Pacquiao winning. However, the finding were useless because Pacquiao still lost and the WBO can’t overturn the results. Why they even bothered to put together the panel in the first place is the real question if they didn’t have the teeth to overturn the results.
Pacquiao apparently is gratified about the WBO seeing him as the winner, saying to the Sports.inquier.net “I am happy that in the end I was vindicated. To me its no longer important if the WBO would not overturn the decision of the judges. The truth has come out and boxing fans got the justice they deserve. I just hope this would restore the trust of the people in boxing.”
Is Pacquiao joking? This isn’t going to change anything. There will always be controversial decisions and there always will be. Pacquiao himself has been on the winning side of two controversial decisions against Juan Manuel Marque, and more than a few people felt that Marquez got robbed big time in those fights. I wonder where the sanctioning bodies were for Marquez? Do they only do this when a big name fighter like Pacquiao loses controversial decisions. I’m wondering if these five man panels are going to be standard for when Pacquiao loses additional fights in the future. I hope not because we don’t see these things for other fighters.
I think it’s poor taste to second guess judges and try to invalidate the decisions they’ve made. The judges came to the conclusion that Pacquiao lost because he looked befuddled with Bradley’s movement, and he was missing an awful lot of punches. I don’t agree with the Compubox punch stats that HBO was supplying for the fight because I saw Pacquiao missing all night long. The judges also no doubt saw how Pacquiao wasn’t doing anything for vast portions of each round and then trying to come on at the very end to steal the round.
Pacquiao showed his age with that kind of fighting, because that’s how old veterans often fight when they can’t muster up enough energy to fight the full three minutes. If you ignore everything that Bradley was doing through three-fourths of every round and only focus on the last thirty seconds then I can agree that Pacquiao won most of the rounds. But that’s not how fights are scored. He didn’t fight hard enough so he lost, and there’s nothing that the WBO can do about it.