Freddie Roach: Cotto is Tough Match for Pacquiao but Winnable

Popular trainer Freddie Roach has admitted that Miguel Cotto is a tough fight for Manny Pacquiao but he said the fight is winnable.

Freddie Roach is now talking about the Pacquiao-Cotto match, an indication that the highly anticipated fight will indeed happen. Yahoo news reports:

If Top Rank promoter Bob Arum succeeds in arranging the match between the pound-for-pound king and the Puerto Rican champion, the fight will take place on November 14 in Las Vegas. “The thing is, he's big and strong and he's young,” Roach said referring to Cotto. “I think it’s a hard fight for us, Cotto is a strong puncher.”

“It's a tough fight, but the way Manny is fighting right now, it's a very winnable fight for us,” he said.

Ignacio ‘Nacho’ Berestain, trainer of Juan Manuel Marquez predicts that Pacquiao will finish Cotto in six rounds. "Cotto remained a little deteriorated after the fight that he had with Antonio Margarito. And to be up against Manny Pacquiao, with all due respect - since I respect and I admire Puerto Rican boxing, but I believe that Pacquiao should put him on the canvas in five or six rounds," he said. Although Cotto is physically superior than the pound –for-pound king, Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach thinks that the fight is winnable. Cotto, who is bigger and taller than the pound-for-pound king, has just agreed to a catch weight of 144-145 as specified by Roach. In the meantime, a draft copy of the contract for the Pacquiao-Cotto match has been forwarded to Team Pacaquiao by Promoter Bob Arum thru Michael Koncz, Pacquiao’s Canadian adviser. It is expected that a contract for the staging of the fight between Pacquaio and Cotto will finalized in the next few days.