By Scott Gilfoid: In watching Amir Khan’s fights in the past year or so, I’ve not been blind to his bad habit of fouling his opponents repeatedly in his fights. The fouls that I’ve seen from Khan are as follows: Holding & hitting, pulling down on his opponents’ heads, shoving them, rabbit punching, headbutting, and shouldering.

I’ve seen other fighters from other part parts of the world use some of those things but rarely seen a fighter pull down on their opponents’ heads and foul to the extent Khan does. However, in watching some of the other British fighters I’ve noticed that they too do a lot of the same kind of fouling that Khan does. For example, David Haye can throw a mean rabbit shot. The guy throws a rabbit shot with beautiful form, getting an arc behind his punches to land perfectly behind some of his opponent’s heads. Look at Haye’s fight against John Ruiz. Haye was cleaning his clock with rabbit punches after hurting him in the 1st round. The referee looked like he didn’t know what to do, as the rabbit shots were coming so fast and furious.

So I’m wondering now is it not a Khan problem but rather Khan being a product of the British fight system that uses different types of strategies in the heat of battle to get wins. Recently, I watched some video of British amateur super heavyweight Anthony Joshua fight against former 2008 Olympic heavyweight champion Roberto Cammarelle from the 2011 world championships and I noticed that Joshua frequently was pulling down on Cammerlle’s head much in the same way that Khan has been doing against his opponents. By the way, I thought Cammerelle deserved the win in that fight instead of Joshua getting the victory. I’ll get over that weird amateur scoring that seems more subjective than objective.

This can’t be accidental, can it? Is this particular type of fouling move common in the British boxing and why isn’t it something that is nipped in the bud and halted early on if it’s not something that is actually taught to fighters? Is this kind of thing encouraged? To what end? When you have a fighter that is showing a tendency to foul frequently, these behaviors are halted by being penalized in fights. But if you’ve one country allowing those kinds of things and other countries taking a different stance towards frequent fouling then something has to give, right?

So is rabbit punching, pulling down on the head, shoving and shouldering part of the game in Britain or is this just a few bad apples that are looking to bend the rules for personal gain?