By William Mackay: There’s no ifs or buts about what Amir Khan’s predicament is for his July 14th fight against WBC light welterweight champion Danny Garcia (23-0, 14 KO’s). Khan absolutely has to KO Garcia in order to save himself a ton of punishment that he’s just not built to take.

If Khan doesn’t get a knockout against Garcia, which I don’t see happening, Khan is going to be forced to run around the ring in order not to get hit. He won’t be able to stand and trade with Garcia in a sustained manner, because Garcia’s got better power than most of the guys that Khan has fought during his career, including his last opponent Lamont Peterson.

Garcia can’t punch as hard as Maidana on a consistent basis, but when Garcia loads up on his shots, he can hit as hard as Maidana. Khan won’t be able to take those kinds of shots from Garcia, and he’ll be forced to run in order to survive. What that’ll do is make Khan look bad, because he won’t be shining and the judges will have to decide whether to give Khan rounds where he’s doing little more than running, likely shoving, pulling down on Garcia’s head and throwing flurries where most of the shots miss. I think that’s going to make it hard for the judges to give Khan rounds, because judges don’t like runners and they likely won’t miss out on seeing using different types of fouls in order to try and halt Garcia’s inside pressure.

I’ve seen too many of Khan’s fights, and I just can’t picture him not grabbing Garcia around the head to shove corral him or shove him to the side. Those fighting tactics are too well ingrained with Khan for him stop at this point. If his trainer Freddie Roach was on the ball, he’d have weeded those bad habits out a long time ago, but it looks like he’s turned a blind eye to them because he uses those tactics in every fight.

Khan is going to have major problems if he can’t score a knockout against Garcia. If Khan thought he took a lot of punishment against Maidana and Peterson, he’s going to have it much, much worse against Garcia.