By Dan Ambrose: Amir Khan (31-3, 19 KOs) maybe the underdog in his fight against WBC middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (46-1-1, 32 KOs) for their scheduled May 7 fight, but Khan thinks Golden Boy Promotions is making a big mistake by matching the red-haired star against him. Khan plans on pulling off the upset, and becoming a huge star in the process.
The Khan vs. Canelo fight will be televised on HBO pay-per-view on 5/7, and already Golden Boy Promotions CEO Oscar De La Hoya is predicting that the fight will bring in over 900,000 PPV buys. De La Hoya hasn’t gotten over the top with his predictions yet like he did with Canelo’s last fight against Miguel Cotto, a fight which De La Hoya thought would bring in over 2 million buys on PPV. The fight brought in far less than that at 900K.
“I think it’s a big mistake to put him in with someone like me, who is going to give him hell on the night,” said Khan to Fighthype about Canelo. “I just hope he doesn’t think this fight is going to be easy, because we’re going to come ready for this fight. My speed is still there. With speed, you’re either born with it or not, and I’m quite lucky to be born with it. It’s great to be the underdog, and to pull off a victory, it’s going to taste even better when I win this fight. Let them say what they want,” said Khan.
It just might be a mistake for Golden Boy to have matched their young star Canelo against Khan. If you look at Canelo’s questionable win over Erislandy Lara, his loss to Floyd Mayweather Jr. and his poor performance against Austin Trout, it’s quite possible that Khan can win this fight. Khan isn’t timid, and he’s constantly throwing punches. Lara lost the fight to Canelo mainly because he didn’t throw enough punches and spent too much time running around the ring.
I still think Lara did enough to deserve the victory over Canelo, but the judges chose to focus on Canelo’s aggressiveness and his harder landing shots. Canelo was only able to land body shots in that fight. He wasn’t landing any head shots, and even his body shots were rare. Lara was in control the entire fight. What the fight showed is it’s very hard to get a decision against Canelo unless your name is Mayweather.
That’s why it’s important for Khan to be offensively oriented in this fight, because I don’t think the judges are going to give him the win if he fails to land enough shots to make it completely 100 percent clear that he won. As we saw in the Mayweather-Canelo fight, one judge had the fight a draw. That kind of gives you an indication in how tough it is to beat Canelo. You can’t just dominate him. You have to dominate him and pray that you’re going to get good scoring.
“Canelo’s a young fighter with a team behind him,” said Khan. “Golden Boy looks after him. It’s a massive marketable fight, me being a big name overseas in England, EAE and Europe. This makes this a huge global fight,” said Khan.
Comments are closed.