By William Mackay: It’s a minor miracle that IBF/WBA light welterweight champion Lamont Peterson was able to beat Amir Khan in their recent fight with all the pushing and pulling down on the head that Khan was doing in the fight.

Peterson felt that he could have fought much better had Khan not be giving him frequent shoves when he would come and try and work on the inside. It’s troubling that both Khan and his promoter Richard Schaefer are saying that pushing isn’t a foul, because Khan sure did use it to his advantage to keep Peterson from getting close.

Peterson told examiner.com “Without him [Khan] pushing me like that, I would have been able to do more work on the inside, where I wanted to fight. He was pushing me that much. Of course he was pushing me away from him so I couldn’t do the work that I wanted to do…It was the pulling down of the neck that bothered me.”

Peterson was obviously bothered by both the pushing off and the head pulling down. He was also bothered by Khan’s headlocks where he would put Peterson in chock-like headlocks and pull him and hold him in place until Peterson’s face would turning red. You could see Peterson’s face turning red from the grip that Khan had around his neck with his arm. How that didn’t get points taken off from the referee I’ll never know.

Khan couldn’t fight on the inside and used pushing off fouls to keep Peterson from getting close. Eventually this led to Khan losing two points, which cost him the fight.

In the future, Khan and his trainer Freddie Roach need to sit down and figure out how to fight without shoving, pulling down on the head and putting fighters in headlocks. This is something that Khan has gotten away with but it’s unclear whether he’ll continue to be able to get away with these fouls in the future now that the referees have the Peterson fight to work off of.