By Chris Williams: You take a good fighter like Amir Khan (19-1, 15 KOs), and then you put him in with a knockout artist early in his career with the obvious conclusion being Amir being flattened in the 1st. Next, his trainer is sacked and replaced by a well known one with experience in training offensive fighters. Khan is then given the formidable task of having to face legendary fighter Marco Antonio Barrera with possibly the WBO lightweight title on the line.
Even though Khan,22, has never fought anyone near the same class as Barrera, he’s still put in with him in a move that appears on the face of it to be begging for trouble. Already, a huge mistake was made by putting a fighter like Khan, with a history of having chin problems, in with knockout artist Breidis Prescott.
The loss for Khan should have sent a message that Amir wasn’t ready to face a tough threat at this point in his career like Prescott, yet here Khan is being thrown to the wolves once more with a fight against Barrera. I can’t care if people say that Marco is a shot fighter and functioning on only half of what he used to be in his prime many years ago.
The problem is that even at roughly 50% of what he used to be, Barrera may be still more than enough to knock Khan out once again. That would, I believe, be a big blow for the career for Khan, putting him in a place where I doubt he could move up from.
A second loss would be a big blow, because Khan would then have little choice but to be matched against the softest punching lightweights for a long time to come to avoid another knockout. A defeat against Barrera, who’s seen as being shot by many people, would leave Khan looking even worse than he’s perceived to be right now.
Because with his speed, size advantage, youth and boxing skills, he should be good enough to beat an old fighter like Barrera. At least you’d like to think he should be. But taking hard shots isn’t something that Khan is especially good at. Say what you want about Barrera, he’s going to be his punches and won’t just fold like many of the poor fighters that have been matched against Khan.
So if we’re to look at the worse thing happening for Khan after a loss to Barrera, we’ll probably be looking at Khan stepping back down to his C-class opposition, and sticking with them for a long time. Not necessarily, though.
His promoter has invested a lot of time and money in him and will probably find it hard to resist putting him in with good opposition in the future regardless of what happens in the Barrera fight. That’s a bad idea, because if Khan is put even with a bottom #15 fighter like Yuri Romanov, Mike Alvarado or Jose Santa Cruz, I don’t fancy Khan’s chances of winning any of those fights.
They might make money for him, just as the Barrera fight will, but in the end it may hurt him if he gets knocked out badly again. With Khan’s chin, he should be still feasting on the lower rung fighters in the 2nd tier and after a long apprenticeship of 40 to 50 fights, I would only then consider moving him up against stiffer competition, but only if he wasn’t getting knocked about by his opposition prior to that. If he doesn’t have the chin for it, then so be it. I would seize managing him and let him go after cashing out with a big fight against someone like Prescott.
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