Fire Quinito’s coverage of the upcoming bout between Manny Pacquiao and Joshua Clottey continues with a review of The Road to Dallas from our special guest critic Alekos Orendain. So does Clottey stand a chance? Read on and find out.

The fight's a little less than a week away and even now it seems that it's gone under the radar for the majority of the 2 months since the fight was announced. Mostly it's been overshadowed by the bad press from the fallout of the shitstorm that was the Manny Pacquiao-Floyd Mayweather fight negotiations, the back and forth taunting that’s still happening between both camps and more importantly the other big fight that resulted from this cancellation: Mayweather versus Shane Mosley.

It seems even HBO decided to give this fight a back seat on the promotional stage as well when they decided not to make a 24/7 show for the fight, instead downgrading it to a 30 minute special in its feature, The Road to Dallas. I can’t really blame HBO for doing that though, like many people I know, I'm finding it a bit hard to get really excited about this fight. For some it may be the disappointment of the Mayweather fight not pushing through. For others, Joshua Clottey is simply a completely unknown fighter to them and therefore they feel he won’t pose any threat to Pacquiao. I was hoping that watching Dallas would provide me with enough insight to find out just how much I need to worry about this fighter from Ghana. By the end of the episode, I still found myself sitting on the fence.

The show itself was like a condensed version of 24/7. Obviously after 12 episodes of 24/7 featuring Pacquiao, there’s really not much about him to feature anymore. But it’s always fun watching clips of him beat up de la Hoya, Hatton and Cotto while various boxing journalists sing his praises so I’m not complaining. The negotiations for the fight with Mayweather were quickly discussed and glossed over, making it seem much less ugly than it really was, and again I’m not complaining. It still sickens me how the whole thing was handled. The two things that did interest me though were what they would show about Pacquiao’s relatively unknown opponent. Joshua “The Grandmaster” Clottey and how amazing it would be to watch the fight live in the ultra high tech Dallas Cowboys stadiums. I mean seriously, who wouldn’t want to watch a fight that has a high def screen the size of half a football field. You’d be able to see every single hair of Manny’s pornstache on that beast of a screen.

As for Joshua Clottey, I don’t really know much about him but I was able to watch his controversial fight with Pacquiao’s latest victim Miguel Cotto. It was a good exciting fight that personally I thought Clottey won. But it seems Clottey is the kind of fighter who always seems to come up short in his biggest fights. Against Cotto, I thought he was leading going into the last few rounds. But when Cotto started running, Clottey took his foot of the gas and didn’t even try to pursue or finish off the hurt and bleeding Cotto. Instead he just stood back and allowed the Boricuan fighter to steal the last few rounds. Cotto didn’t win that fight, Clottey lost it.

You wouldn’t think that though when watching the HBO feature. In the Dallas, they showed a fighter who grew up in a tough, poor area of Ghana where fighting presented half of the career opportunities available. You’d think the kind of fighter you’d get from that kind of neighborhood would be the real aggressive warrior types like Tyson or Pacquiao. But instead in Clottey we get a defensive counter puncher whose biggest asset is having a really tough defense to crack.

So like I said, I was hoping that the show would help me decide if I should be worried or not. On the one hand, you have this really big welterweight who according to many did enough to win the fight Cotto, who's skilled enough to have never lost decisively to anybody. Skilled enough to make you think he could be one of the elite fighters in the sport if only he could utilize is considerable boxing arsenal to the fullest. A tough fighter who has never been really hurt in the ring and has never been stopped.

On the other hand, you have a fighter who has a tendency to take his foot of the gas and finds ways to lose fights. A whiner who tends to act a lot during fights. A fighter who lacks that killer instinct that Pacquiao has in spades. A fighter who frankly seems a bit too star struck about fighting the best fighter in the sport today and giddy about getting his biggest payday ever. A fighter who’s trainer is stuck in Ghana because he was denied a US Visa and is now being trained by Pacquiao’s former cut man, Lenny de Jesus, who said that he doesn’t need to watch tapes of Pacquiao’s fights because he’s already seen Pacquiao train before. Which is a seriously dumb idea if you take into account the fact that the last time he saw Pacquiao train was for the 1st Morales fight back in 2005. I guess Lenny missed the part where everyone is saying that Pacquiao has improved by leaps and bounds since then. But hey, maybe he’s right. He even said that he had the “key” to beating Pacquiao, and since the guy has been a locksmith for over 40 years, who knows? Maybe he really does. And maybe Bobby Pacquiao will become the next best pound-for-pound fighter in the world.

Luckily for me, I’m a bit of a pessimist when it comes to these fights and my indecision about this fight is making me lean more towards the school of thought that Clottey will be all that he can be in this fight (no thanks to his trainer) and give Pacquiao a real tough time or even pull a huge upset. Because believe me, if we get the Clottey that fought Cotto, I firmly believe that the fighter from the mean streets of Ghana doesn’t stand a chance and Freddie Roach will be right again, Pacquiao by KO in the 6th or 7th.