Floyd Mayweather Jr to skip Manny Pacquiao to fight in UK? Dream on

There was wild talk this week of Floyd Mayweather Jr aborting his fight against Manny Pacquiao in March and coming to England instead to fight Matthew Hatton. Right. And I am fighting Amir Khan on the same bill.

According to ringsidereport.com, Mayweather will pull out of the biggest fight in the history of boxing – tentatively set for 13 March at a venue yet to be decided – unless he gets "wiggle room" on the weight, preferably closer to 147lb than the low '40s Pacman is comfortable with. According to these clumsily leaked reports, Mayweather is hinting he will have a warm-up fight on that date instead – against Hatton in the UK or Yuri Foreman in the US.

A lot of things are wrong with this picture. For a start, Bob Arum (who promotes Foreman) is negotiating for Pacquiao and says he is happy with the date, even though Pacman's trainer, Freddie Roach, is not. Is Arum trying to provoke Mayweather into pulling out of the Pacquiao fight so he can slip Foreman in for a payday against him on 13 March – then resume negotiations for a May fight with Pacquiao?

Neither Mayweather nor Roach would mind. Pacquiao, who is running for Congress in the Philippines on 10 May, might not be crazy about a postponement, but he could live with it. While Foreman would be a tough pay-per-view sell, it would be a decent ticking-over fight for Mayweather.

So where does Hatton come in?

For Matthew, whose brother's promotional company has worked closely with the Mayweather-friendly Golden Boy Promotions, this talk looks like a diversion; he is, after all, coming off a loss to Lovemore N'dou and, as dedicated a fighter as he has always been, Matthew is not in the same class as Mayweather. (Ditto Foreman, a decent boxer with no punch.)

Hatton and Foreman are mere bargaining chips, being shoved around the gambling table by Arum and Golden Boy. Don't get too excited by these stories. There are plenty to come. The bigger issues are the venue and date of the big one. All (or maybe nothing) will be revealed at a press conference in New York on 11 January.

My bet is the fight will be at the MGM Grand on 1 May, nine days before Pacquiao runs for Congress. A win over Mayweather is surely all the campaigning he'd need to do to win a majority among the 33,000 voters in the township of Alabel, a rural community near his home town of General Santos City.

Source: guardian.co.uk