Echoes Of The Past

Pacquiao dominates Broner but Mayweather, typically aloof, refuses to commit to speculated return, writes Elliot Worsell

- Elliot Worsell

THE Sin City meeting of welterweights Manny Pacquiao and Adrien Broner wasn’t so much a fight as a karaoke contest between two men struggling to sing in tune.

For 12 rounds, Broner mimicked his heroes, striking all the right poses and performing some of the right moves, but nothing that came out of his mouth made much sense, while Pacquiao, the dwindling superstar, occasionally rolled back the years to deliver the odd classic or two but mostly fell short of hitting notes of old. The result was a unanimous decision (117-111, 116-112, 116-112) in favour of Pacquiao. There was no demand for an encore.

In many ways, this fight, one nobody saw coming nor craved, was an audition, and Floyd May weather, the Simon Cowell of the piece, was ringside in Las Vegas casting an eye over it all. Sitting metres from an old rival, he did the usual Floyd May weather thing throughout: he called Manny Pacquiao a hell of a fighter; he said Adrien Broner needed to do more; he looked simultaneously gripped and disinterested. Then, at the fight’s conclusion, when asked if he fancied coming out of retirement to fight Pacquiao, he revealed not a shred of insight. He didn’t nod his head, nor shake it. He ignored his buzzer. He certainly didn’t rush the ring as many had expected.

Instead, May weather, in appearing so nonplussed by it all, managed to somehow make a fight, Pacquiao vs. Broner, seem an even more pointless exercise than it had seemed for its 36-minute duration. By not entertaining the idea of fighting Pacquiao again, May weather had everybody wondering why there was any need at all to have watched what had just unfolded – essentially, a dress rehearsal.