How Ricky Hatton Could Beat Manny Pacquiao

Outside of the camp of Ricky Hatton, and the mellifluous rhymes of his trainer, Floyd Mayweather Sr., the boxing world seems near-unanimous in its belief that Manny Pacquiao will defeat Hatton in their mega-fight tomorrow night in Las Vegas. So much so that most of the conjecture about the fight in the media seems to surround the mutual dislike of the two trainers involved (Mayweather and Freddie Roach, Pacquiao’s trainer) and debates as to how well the fight will fare on pay-per-view and whether it will solidify Pacquiao’s stature as the sport’s number-one attraction, a role recently vacated by the retired Oscar De La Hoya.

But in that the fight is now only one short day away, it’s high time to turn our focus away from the preoccupations of money and fame and Floyd Sr.’s terrible poetry and onto what we actually might see happen inside the ring on Saturday night.

I admit that I count myself among the pundits who think that Pacquiao will beat Hatton, and beat him convincingly. Most of the advantages are on his side -- speed, mobility, footwork, accuracy. To beat the Ricky Hatton that we’ve seen in the past, a plodding, predictable fighter, Pacquiao need only cling to the fight-plan that he used to dismantle Oscar De La Hoya in December, using his frightening speed to continually move in and out of range at various angles, getting off his machine-gun combinations and then bouncing out of danger while his slower opponent launches counters into thin air.

How, though, if Hatton is to pull off the upset, will he go about getting it done?

It’s a difficult question to answer, because it presupposes that he has developed under the tutelage of Mayweather into a Ricky Hatton that we never have seen before. This is not only my assessment of the situation -- it’s Hatton’s as well.

“Three or four fights ago, Manny Pacquiao would have beaten me,” Hatton told Boxing Scene’s Mark Vester recently. “I don’t think so now. I feel so much more relaxed because I’m boxing technically so much better. I’m jabbing and moving a lot better.”

So it’s the new Ricky Hatton who’s going to beat Pacquiao Saturday night, and for clues as to how he plans to do it, we can only turn to the words of the fighter himself and his trainer.

The main thing that Hatton seems to focus on when he talks about his advantages in the fight are 1) That he’s a much better boxer now, and 2) That he’s the bigger man. The first point remains to be seen. But the second is definitely a point of interest. Pacquiao’s frame right now is the frame of an average-to-small lightweight. He probably still would be at his most potent fighting at junior lightweight, 130 pounds. Only twice has he fought above the 130-pound limit, and both times he fought men who were very limited for different reasons -- David Diaz at 135 pounds, who is simply not very good, and then Oscar De La Hoya at 147 pounds, who was well past his prime and utterly emaciated fighting as a welterweight for the first time in seven years.

So Hatton indeed will be the first fighter of consequence to pose Manny a legitimate size differential in the ring. It’s hard, though, when I imagine this fight for me to see how that will influence the outcome. I imagine that Manny will step into the ring weighing around 145-147, and Hatton be in the low 150’s. A potential gap of around seven pounds, not inconsequential at all in the sport of boxing, an entire weight division in fact. But given that Hatton does not enjoy a significant height or reach advantage over Pacquiao, and in that Pacquiao has such a huge advantage in speed, I am not convinced that Hatton’s heft will be a huge factor in the outcome.

The only thing one wonders about is how the weight will influence Hatton’s experience of Manny’s power. It’s clear that Manny doesn’t have the same one-punch knockout capability at these higher weights that he did when he was a sub-130 pounder. Granted, both David Diaz and De La Hoya are known for being very difficult guys to put down, but nevertheless, Manny hit both of them with gigantic shots at will, and though he ultimately gave both a beating, it took a large accumulation of punches to get the job done in each case.

We saw in Hatton’s last fight, against the weak-punching, one-handed Paulie Malignaggi, that Hatton can be a very effective boxer when he feels he can’t be hurt. Which is not to say that Pacquiao’s shots will be as ineffectual as Paulie’s by any means, but if Hatton finds that he can absorb Manny’s shots without much danger of being buzzed, then he has the potential to inflict a lot of damage on Pacquiao in the old Joe Frazier tradition of moving forward aggressively behind jabs and hooks and often taking two (or three, or five) to give one.

When you take that path, of course, that one has to really really count. And that’s where I imagine, if Hatton is going to pull off the upset, the fight playing out like last summer’s Antonio Margarito/Miguel Cotto epic. In that thing, Cotto, the infinitely more mobile and speedy puncher, stayed on his bicycle early and pummeled Margarito with a staggering array of combinations from all manner of angles. For six rounds, he did this, and he arguably won all six of those rounds on the scorecards. But the whole time, Margarito, seemingly immune to pain that night, stalked Cotto, came forward relentlessly and broke him down to the body whenever he had an opportunity (with, maybe, gloves made of steel … but that’s another story). By the seventh, though Margarito had landed by far the fewer punches, those he’d landed had made an impact. The starch was gone from Cotto’s shots and he slowed down considerably. Winded and wounded, he wilted, and it was Tony Margarito’s time to shine.

Most of the analyses that I’ve read so far for tomorrow’s fight seem to think that if Hatton is going to win, it will be because he starts fast and gets all over Pacquiao in the earlygoing. I don’t see it that way at all. Pacquiao is just too fast for him, and the idea that Hatton’s handspeed has grown so much with Floyd Mayweather’s mitt-work that he can go speed-to-speed with Pacquiao is to me dubious at best. I imagine that for five rounds or so, this fight is going to look a lot like Pacquiao/Diaz, or Pacquiao/De La Hoya, with Manny dominating a man who at times appears helpless. The difference will be a question of whether Hatton, as Margarito did with Cotto, is able to withstand Pacquiao’s mobile onslaught without getting too hurt, and whether he’s able to land anything during that time that slows Manny down for the later rounds and allows him to turn it into a brawl.

The x-factor in that analysis is that we’ve yet to see how Pacquiao handles punishment at these higher weights, because neither Diaz nor De La Hoya were able to hit him. Like, ever. Literally, those guys barely laid a glove on Pacquiao. Hatton is almost certain to do better than that, and if his footwork has improved and he’s gotten more savvy about cutting off the ring, then he has a chance to do much better. Then, THEN, we’d have a fight on our hands.

The two things in this scenario that do not favor Hatton are that he’s not a one-punch knockout guy, and Manny is not known to fade down the stretch. If Hatton had a huge punch in his arsenal, then you could imagine him slowing Pacquiao down with a body assault and then catching him with a bomb that ended the fight. But Hatton just doesn’t have that club in his bag. He will be relying on the Margarito equation, prolonged savagery that eventually breaks Pacquiao’s will. And, well, we’ve never seen that happen before. Floyd Sr. is making much of the fact that Pacquiao has been stopped before by body shots, but not in ten years, a veritable lifetime ago as far as Manny’s career is concerned. Today, Pacquiao is one of the most superbly conditioned and determined fighters in the sport, and it’s very hard to imagine him wearing down late against Hatton, onslaught to the body or not.

Hard to imagine, and yet it’s still the only avenue that I see Hatton taking to victory. And to be fair, stranger things have happened. There are definitely some unknowns here. How much faster and more accurate is Hatton now with his punches? How much pop does Pacquiao have against a legit 140-pounder in his prime? And, most importantly, how much heart does Hatton really have? He talks a lot about that heart of his. In my mind, to win tomorrow night he’s going to have to put on a performance to rival Margarito’s against Cotto from last July, which, disregarding the whole subsequent loaded-gloves controversy, remains one of the most superhuman displays of endurance and pain absorption that I’ve ever seen. Margarito went down into the burning ring of fire to beat Cotto. Does Hatton have that club in his bag? He better hope so, because he’s going to need it.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.