You can never trust the first round in boxing.
I remember watching Ricky Hatton's fight with Floyd Mayweather in a sold-out function room in Bolton after an Amir Khan fight.
Hatton had some success in the opening session, and the place was buzzing with expectation going into the second. It was all downhill from there.
Miguel Cotto's fans must have experienced something similar on Saturday night.
He didn't exactly dominate the opening round of his fight with Manny Pacquiao at the MGM Grand, but he controlled things with his jab and looked as if he would give the Filipino a decent argument. It was all an illusion.
By the 12th round, and having visited the canvas twice during what would turn out to be a one-sided beating, Cotto looked a finished fighter.
If a boxer suffers a bad loss, talk always turns to retirement, sometimes unfairly.
But having gone through the mill against Antonio Margarito, it can't have been healthy for Cotto to have taken repeated punishment from Pacquiao, even if he did get on his bike in the closing rounds.
While Cotto's future looks limited, Pacquiao has the world at his feet.
His popularity grows by the day and his ability between the ropes seems boundless.
Logic dictates that the higher the weight he fights at, the less effective he should be.
Yet Pacquiao's power and speed have got better with the pounds he has put on.
A fight against motormouth Mayweather is surely the only option for both fighters, as nothing else will come anywhere near being as lucrative.
There's little doubt that Pacquiao would take the clash in a heartbeat, but Mayweather, for all his usual trash-talking, seems strangely reluctant to commit.
"If I beat Manny Pacquiao they'll say, 'You're supposed to beat him, you're the bigger man'," said Mayweather. '"You supposed to knock him out'. "When I beat him, people won't be surprised because he's been beaten before. He's been knocked out twice before. "The world will go wild if Floyd Mayweather gets beat, that's what the world is looking to see. They're trying to make a fighter to beat me. I'm a fighter that's never been beaten. I don't get any respect in the sport of boxing. "Can Manny Pacquiao beat me? No, absolutely no. Easy win, easy fight." Although the quotes may suggest otherwise, I've got a suspicion that Mayweather isn't as keen on the fight as he's making out. He's obviously worried about his legacy, and he's right when he says that it will be a far bigger deal if Pacquiao beats him than if he gets the better of Manny. But with the fight predicted to smash box office records and gross upwards of $100m, money, as usual, will have the final say.
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