By Sean McDaniel: IBF/WBA light welterweight champion Amir Khan is licking his chops at the thought of facing what he perceives as a fading WBC welterweight champion Floyd Mayweather Jr. Khan thinks Mayweather is starting to lose his skills, noting that Mayweather is getting hit now rather than making his opponents miss.

Khan is hoping that he’s the one that can give Mayweather his first loss next year if Khan can get a fight with him. So far, Khan says he’s been given a verbal agreement from Mayweather that he’ll fight him. However, Mayweather hasn’t said a word about it, so it’s still unknown whether Mayweather will actually fight Khan or just mess with his head and leave him hanging.

Khan said this about Mayweather at The Times: “It’s all about timing. Mayweather will be 35. He’s hit his peak. I’m getting stronger. It happens to all the beat fighters, to Ali and all the big names. They get beaten in the end. You can see now Mayweather gets caught. That never happened before. He’s walking forward and you can see he’s very robotic compared to those early days…He loses and that’s him finished. And his time is up….he’s gone soft.”

I thought Mayweather looked pretty good in his last fight against Victor Ortiz. I didn’t see him looking robotic. He’s always been hit from time to time. Perhaps Khan never saw Mayweather’s fights against Jose Luis Castillo, Ricky Hatton, Juan Manuel Marquez, and Shane Mosley. Mayweather was hit in all of those fights from time to time. But what makes Mayweather so good is that he made each one of those fighters miss a lot of their punches and he was quick to counter them with pinpoint punches.

Mayweather isn’t moving like he used to around the ring, but he really doesn’t need to. All the movement Mayweather did earlier in his career was really wasted movement because he was making his opponents miss when he was at a full stop anyway, and really didn’t need all the running around to win. The movement really limited Mayweather’s offense to mostly jabbing. He could only punch when he would come to a halt. He’s so much better now than he was back then because of that.