Barrera Predicts Easy Victory Over Khan

By Boxing News - 03/11/2009 - Comments

barrera346533By Eric Thomas: Three-time world champion Marco Antonio Barrera (65-6. 43 KOs) is predicting not only that he’ll beat Amir Khan (19-1, 15 KOs) this Saturday night at the M.E.N. Arena, in Manchester, but it will be even easier than his victory over British boxing great Naseem Hamed, who Barrera defeated by a lopsided 12-round unanimous decision eight years ago in April 2001. Hamed would fight only more time in his career before hanging up his gloves and falling into inactivity.

Khan, who thus far in his four year career has accomplished nothing close to what Barrera has accomplished, but it’s still early yet in his career. However, Barrera accurately points out in an interview with the BBC that he was far ahead of Khan by this stage of his career, saying “By the time I was Khan’s age I had made six world title defenses and beaten some greats.”

Clearly, Khan is lagging far behind the accomplishments of Barrera, and few at this point expect him to be even close to as good as Barrera has been throughout his career. But what makes this fight so appealing now, though, is that Barrera has apparently lost enough of his skills to allow Khan to compete with him, at least on paper.

Khan has been lucky enough not to have had to face too many tough exchanges with his opponents during his short career, mostly because of the poor opposition he’s been put in with. When Khan was finally put in with a live opponent – Breidis Prescott – with power and skills, he was taken out in the 1st round last year. Say what you want about Barrera having lost much of his skills, he’s still good enough to force Khan into a war.

That’s where tricky part comes in for Amir. If his chin isn’t up to the task of handling Barrera’s shots or if he can’t take Barrera’s typically brutal body attacks, he’s going to end up getting knocked out well before the 12th round.

Most people would agree that Naseem Hamed is a better fighter than Khan, and probably would have handled him easy if the two had met earlier in Hamed’s career, yet Barrera easily defeated Hamed and it wasn’t even slightly close. That’s not a good sign for Khan. It would seem that Khan’s best chance to beat Barrera is if he can stay on the move for a full 12 rounds and use his jab to do most of the work.

If he slows down and gets into an exchange with Barrera, chances are Khan will be knocked out. The real question is whether Khan can move for a full 12 rounds without slowing down and getting trapped by Barrera. As it turns out, he may not have to because Barrera has a lot of partially unhealed scar tissue above his left eye from his cut suffered from a head butt in his recent fight with Freudis Rojas on January 31st.

Many boxing experts feel that there wasn’t nearly enough time for the cut to properly heal and that it will likely open up early after Khan hits it hard for a few rounds. The cut, it if it opens, will likely cause the fight to end early because of the location of the cut. It may not be a pretty way to get a victory, but it might be Khan’s best chance.



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