By Sean McDaniel: As I read about this and that fighter wanting to get a piece of lightweight Amir Khan (20-1, 15 KOs), a thing that many people are forgetting is that Khan may not get past his next opponent WBA light welterweight champion Andriy Kotelnik in their June 27th fight at the O2 Arena, in London. Khan, 22, is making a move up in weight to take the fight and hasn’t shown that he can beat top contenders at the lower lightweight division, let alone an actual champion.
In taking a step up against Kotelnik, Khan is facing a bigger fighter and one clearly better than the opposition that Khan has been served up in his short four year career. Obviously, Khan and his management team see Kotelnik as beatable otherwise they wouldn’t risk putting Amir in with the 31-year-old Ukrainian champion.
However, Kotelnik has more power than he’s getting credit for and he could very well flatten Khan if he can hit him. With Khan, it doesn’t necessarily need to be a big shot to the chin, because he was staggered by a jab from Breidis Prescott, the Colombian fighter that knocked Khan out in the 1st round last year.
Khan has been dropped by a number of other lightweights with only marginal power, and yet they were able to hurt Khan.
Right now, Khan is feeling good about himself after dominating Marco Antonio Barrera in their five round bout before it was stopped due to a cut above Barrera’s left eye on his forehead. That fight seems to have given Khan the impression that he’s improved from his knockout loss to Prescott.
Another way of looking at the win, however, is that the 35-year-old Barrera was a handpicked opponent who was well past his best years in the sport and had no business fighting at lightweight. The win proves little other than Khan could beat a fighter that is smaller than him and past his prime.
Kotelnik, though, appears to be fighting at a much higher level than Barrera, and looked good in beating Argentinean knockout artist Marcos Rene Maidana by a 12-round split decision in February. The kinds of shots that Maidana hit Kotelnik in that fight would have probably put Khan in serious trouble if not knocking him unconscious. Kotelnik took the shots and fired back with his own power shots each time and traded blows with Maidana for the full 12 rounds, even getting the better of him in the late action.
Khan’s trainer Freddie Roach is probably tooling Amir to stay on the move for a full 12 rounds and avoid mixing it up with Kotelnik. That is going to be impossible for Khan to do, because he’s not good at moving constantly without getting tagged every once in awhile. Khan seems to get overconfident at times and gets caught up with the crowd applause after he lands his combinations.
That will likely be his undoing against Kotelnik, because when Khan comes in trying to fire away with power shots, Kotelnik will probably hit him with a moderately hard shot that will, because of Khan’s brittle chin, leave him stretched out on the canvas wondering where he’s at. When a fighter is knocked out like Khan was against Prescott, they have a tendency to get knocked out even easier in the future.
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