By Chris Williams: We’ve all heard the excuses from Amir Khan about his loss to Lamont Peterson last December, and it looks like the excuses have been swallowed up by Khan’s boxing fans who are giving him a pass for the defeat. However, if Khan loses to WBC light welterweight champion Danny Garcia on July 14th, he may need to consider dumping his trainer Freddie Roach in order to find someone that can teach Khan to defend himself.

There are a number of glaring weaknesses in Khan’s game that I just don’t see Roach making any improvement on. Khan has been with Roach two years, and to me he looks just as flawed as he was the first day he walked into Roach’s Wildcard Gym in Los Angeles, California.

Here are the areas that Khan has shown no improvement:

* Throwing useless flurries with most of the shots missing badly. The flurries use up valuable energy and they leave Khan open to getting tagged.

* Running around the ring at too high of speeds. Khan needs to slow down when circling the ring, because he wears himself out in the later rounds by dashing around so quickly. Roach has done a poor job of slowing Khan down and getting him to move at a more measured pace so that he doesn’t exhaust himself.

* Khan is still not using his jab as much as he should. With his long arms, he can beat most of his opposition without ever even getting hit if he would just throw jabs. Roach should have changed this in Khan’s game. Therefore, Roach needs to go.

* Khan still can’t fight a lick on the inside after two years of being with Roach. I don’t know if Roach is the one that taught Khan to shove and pull down on the heads of his opponents, but if he has, he needs to be dumped for that. Teaching Khan how to shove and pull down on opponent’s heads is a poor replacement to teaching them some valuable inside fighting skills.