By William Mackay: Sky Sports had decided to move the April 16 fight between WBA light welterweight champion Amir Khan (24-1, 17 KO’s) and Paul McCloskey (22-0, 12 KO’s) from pay-per-view to Sky Sports 3, a move that could reduce Khan’s previously hefty payday from £1.25 million pounds to around £250,000. Boy, that’s got to hurt. The card, which was rather skimpy and lacking in talent from the start, was recently beefed up a bit with the addition of Tyson Fury and Rendall Munroe.

Still, it hardly seemed like a PPV card even with those fighters because Fury is still little more than a novice on his way up and Munroe was recently soundly beaten in his last fight by WBC super bantamweight champion Toshiaki Nishioka in a lopsided loss. Rahman reportedly doesn’t want to take the fight with Fury on only two weeks notice and who can blame him. Rahman has been coming in heavy in his last two fights and you can only imagine how heavy he is right now. It would be giving Fury a huge advantage if he were to fight him in less than his best shape.

The Khan-McCloskey fight is getting rejected obviously by Sky McCloskey isn’t well known enough for this fight to sell on it’s own. This is looking like a mismatch similar to Khan’s last fight in the UK against Dmitriy Salita, a fighter that Khan knocked out in the 1st round. UK fans probably weren’t too happy about that mismatch. However, that was more of a fault of the WBA, who for some strange reason decided to make Salita Khan’s number #1 contender despite the fact that Salita had ever fought a 1st tier fighter during his entire career. It had mismatch written on it even before the fight started. Sky wants to put competitive fights on PPV, and the Khan-McCloskey isn’t looking like it’s going to be a competitive match-up because of McCloskey, like Salita, has never fought a 1st tier opponent before until now. That’s Khan and his promoter’s fault for choosing this guy. If you pick an unknown, you can’t expect the boxing public to fork over big bucks on PPV to watch you beat him up on. Sky is looking out for their best interests and probably don’t want another Khan-Salita mismatch or a fight similar to the Audley Harrison vs. David Haye bout last year, which left a lot of fans unhappy who had wasted their hard-earned money purchasing the fight on PPV.