Boring or Not, Joshua Clottey Fought the Right Fight Against Manny Pacquiao

Joshua Clottey does not owe the boxing world any apologies for the way he fought this past Saturday (March 13, 2010).

Clottey has established himself as one of the best welterweights in the world fighting the way he fights, and even if he lost the fight by an overwhelming margin, he was just a clean combo away from knocking Manny Pacquiao out cold.

Watching the fight, I can tell you that if I were to do a highlight countdown on the best punches landed in the fight, it would all be punches Clottey landed.

Every one of those punches clearly hurt Pacquiao. Only Pacquiao's good head movement and footwork saved him from getting hit in the right place.

Clottey is not a dumb boxer. His style enables him to assess what he is dealing with and react accordingly.

In my opinion, upon getting a feel of what Pacquiao was doing, he found that Pacquiao's punches were not hard enough to hurt him. However, he also saw the speed and the pace and knew that they were strong enough that a large quantity of those punches would eventually catch up to him if he decided to absorb them.

If one had seen the fight between Pacquiao and David Diaz, one would remember that Diaz did not feel hurt in the middle rounds. However, the quantity of punches simply caught up so that Diaz just collapsed to the canvas due to fatigue.

Anyone who saw Pacquiao's fights against Oscar De La Hoya and Miguel Cotto also saw the results of what taking a large quantity of punches from Pacquiao can do.

If I were Clottey, I would ask why I would approach the fight the same way those guys did. It was a losing strategy. So he decided to fight his style and give Pacquiao something different.

Unfortunately for Clottey, he never found the opening he wanted, and Pacquiao's conditioning allowed the Filipino to maintain his frantic punching pace.

People are saying Clottey did not give himself a chance to win this fight. My answer is that he patiently waited 12 rounds looking for that chance and simply never saw it.

Had he seen enough of those opportunities, he would have taken advantage of them. They were just few and far between.

That said, in my opinion, Joshua Clottey fought the right fight.