Vegas gets ready to rumble again

Manchester’s light-welterweight king Ricky Hatton faces Filipino superstar Manny Pacquiao at Las Vegas’ MGM Grand Casino in the early hours of tomorrow morning in the first super-fight of 2009. But has the economic downturn impacted on the appetite for big time boxing Stateside? Simon Lewis reports from Nevada.

THE taxi driver for last Monday’s short journey from McCarran Airport to the Las Vegas Strip was a Filipino and therefore a Manny Pacquiao fan and, needless to say, he was backing a Pacman victory.

Manny, he said, was already in town and hitting the track on the UNLV campus for his daily run at 5am but apart from that and in spite of the massive hoardings promoting tonight’s light-welterweight showdown with Britain’s Ricky Hatton, there was not much of a buzz surrounding Sin City’s first mega-fight of the year.