Trainer, commentator and fight analyst, Teddy Atlas, has likened Tuesday’s unified super-bantamweight title bout to the famously delayed yet still monumental showdown between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao.
Both Mayweather and Pacquiao were considered as the top pound-for-pound fighters on the planet for over a decade and were linked to a fight with one another for the same amount of time.
The pair eventually met in 2015, where ‘Money’ Mayweather put on a defensive clinic against the Filipino legend. Fans still argue that the encounter could’ve played out differently had it happened a few years earlier when Pac-Man was more dangerous.
On his YouTube channel, Atlas looked forward to Stephen Fulton’s title defence, Naoya Inoue – and said this is a taste for fans of what Mayweather-Pacquiao would have looked like ‘in their primes.’
“For me, what this fight really gives the fans is a peak back into the future. You’ve seen those movies, ‘Back To The Future’, what would it have looked like if Pacquiao and Mayweather, the monstrous fight that everybody was waiting for, had happened five years earlier?
So many of the fans out there, I’m sure that would have been on their wish list, could it have happened when they were in their prime? They’re going to get a little bit of an idea of what would have happened.”
“You have the great offensive skills of Inoue, just like you did with Pacquiao, versus the great defensive and counter-punching skills of Fulton, very similar but not quite up to the [level of the] defensive master that Mayweather was, but along those lines.
Those are the styles that you are going to get. You’re going to get the chance to figure out whether, in their primes, does defence beat offence?”
Fulton will make a second defence of his unified crown against Inoue on Tuesday July 25 at the Ariake Arena in Tokyo.