Filipino living legend Manny Pacquiao returns tomorrow night at 39 years old to fight dangerous power puncher Lucas Matthysse. What can we realistically expect out of the aging former top pound for pound fighter?
1998. That was the year Emmanuel “Manny” Pacquiao (59-7-2, 38 KOs) won his first world title, twenty years ago now. I’ll repeat that. Manny Pacquiao has been fighting on the world level for twenty years now. His accolades along the way are well noted and celebrated. Titles in eight weight classes, the legendary destruction of Marco Antonio Barrera, the fierce trilogy with Erik Morales, the four fight series with Juan Manuel Marquez, and so much more. This includes one of the greatest runs in the history of the welterweight division from about 2008 to 2011 when Pacquiao was essentially a god fighting mortals. Just ask Oscar De La Hoya or Ricky Hatton.
Of course, that isn’t the Pacquiao we can expect to watch on ESPN+ tomorrow night. When we all saw the Filipino further cement his legend by stopping Miguel Cotto in 2009, who amongst us would have thought he would remain an active fighter for another decade without scoring another stoppage win? Put your hand down, liar. Since the start of 2012, Manny Pacquiao is technically 5-4. Those seven years have seen their share of controversy though. Few watching beyond the judges thought either Tim Bradley or Jeff Horn actually deserved those decisions over him, but they got them nonetheless.
Here’s the thing though. I am not one of the majority who throws a fit about those decisions. The truth is that the collective boxing hive mind can be just as bad at scoring fights as official judges. Take the first Bradley fight for Pacquiao for example, the first one everyone cried robbery over. That fight was full of two kinds of rounds split relatively evenly. There were the rounds that Pacquiao absolutely dominated and there were the rounds he took off and didn’t fight much. Tim Bradley didn’t come out and authoritatively command those rounds either, but he was trying to work while Manny was not. Boxing pundits and fans all too naturally will give a decent amount of those nothing rounds to the guy who is dominating the other rounds, but that isn’t necessarily how the 10 point must system works. The official judges scored those rounds to Tim Bradley very fairly and got the decision we did. This is more or less what happened against Jeff Horn too.
I want to stress that even I still did score both fights for Manny Pacquiao, but I had them extremely narrowly and wasn’t all that shocked to see official judges coming back with losses for him. This sort of situation is what I worry about for Pacquiao going forward too. Not that he will be involved in more controversial decisions, but that the factors that led to his two will only become more pronounced as he ages even further. Pacquiao could not fight twelve complete rounds in those fights. He’s still been able to do it in recent years against a slightly lesser level of talent like against Chris Algieri or Jessie Vargas, but not at the absolute highest level.
Fortunately for him, I don’t think that is what Lucas Matthysse (39-4, 36 KOs) represents at this point in his career, if he ever did at all. Much like with Pacquiao, there was a time that the Argentinian was one of the absolute most fear fighters in the sport. Following his quick and merciless destruction of a top contender in Lamont Peterson, Matthysse went into his 2013 showdown with Danny Garcia as the favorite. He was outboxed though. Life and death battles with lesser fighters in John Molina Jr and Ruslan Provodnikov were wins for Lucas afterward, but they also proved he wasn’t the world level killer that everyone briefly thought he had become. Viktor Postol sealed that idea by outclassing and stopping him in 2015.
Lucas Matthysse did not fight in 2016 and competed only once in 2017. He did fight in January of this year against Tewa Kiram on HBO and emerged with a knockout win, but it was a fight where he had some issues with pulling the trigger and finding an opponent that didn’t necessarily want to engage. He shouldn’t have this problem with Pacquiao, exactly, but it does raise one level of concern that I have with this fight. Despite their reputations as exciting fighters, I am not exactly sure we are going to get a good fight out of this. Pacquiao has struggled to fight consistently in terms of volume round by round and we’ve seen Matthysse having some issues pulling the trigger this very year. This could be a fight with some real lulls in it.
If they can let their hands go, their styles do match up well though. I’m not writing off a good action fight completely, just noting that it is far from a guarantee at this point. I also still expect Pacquiao to have enough left to mostly control this. He has certainly had his fair share of well documented distractions ranging from his career in politics to his trainer switch and self promotion here, but I’m going to focus on in ring work more than things I can’t predict how they will affect him. In his last three years and three fights, Manny Pacquiao has comfortably beat a hall of famer in Tim Bradley, a recent titleholder in Jessie Vargas, and most thought he beat a large, strong, and young welterweight in Jeff Horn. He’s still a top ten welterweight very comfortably even given how diminished he is from his peak. Lucas Matthysse hasn’t performed on the same level. His power remains real and that could change everything here, but there has been little in the ring to indicate that he’ll be able to land it.
Of course, 39 is 39. There is a very real possibility that we see a legend finish falling of a cliff tomorrow night. I just don’t think we are they quite yet, or at the very least do not have the right opponent for it yet. ESPN+ will have the broadcast at 9 PM Eastern. We’ll find our answers there.
