By Sean McDaniel: Trainer Freddie Roach doesn’t sound overjoyed with the prospect of his fighter World Boxing Association light welterweight champion Amir Khan (22-1, 16 KO’s) fighting interim WBA champion Marcos Maidana (27-1, 26 KO’s), saying in an article at The Sun, “It’s a business and it’s about the right fights at the right time. There are some good fights out there for Amir.” That’s sounding like Roach is considering other options for Khan rather than a fight with Maidana.

If that’s the case, then Khan will have to vacate his WBA title or else face being stripped of it by the WBA, who recently ordered for Khan to face Maidana next. Khan could likely have little trouble finding more lucrative – and safer – fights out there than Maidana. However, if Khan does decide to vacate his title, knowledgeable boxing fans will very likely heap scorn on Amir by the bucketfuls, saying that he’s ducking Maidana.

However, it might be better for Khan to be called a ducker by some boxing fans rather than to risk getting his head knocked off by the powerful and tough Maidana. The Argentinean fighter is in the prime of his career, and is used to his fights being violent brawls. In contrast, Khan is only 23, and has rarely been in a competitive fight where he’s getting hit all that much.

Make no mistake, Maidana will be hitting Khan if they do fight, and hitting him a lot. It might not be such a big deal if Maidana was a light hitter like Andriy Kotelnik, Marco Antonio Barrera, Dmitry Salita and most of Khan’s other victims, but he’s not. Maidana hits harder than Breidis Prescott, and we already saw what happened to Khan when he went up against the hard hitting Prescott. Khan might be better off relinquishing his title and looking to fight a light hitter like Gavin Rees or Paul McCloskey. Those are opponents that Khan could dominate without too much risk.

Roach says “He [Khan] can outbox Maidana, but he’s tough, a good puncher, and you don’t want to exchange with him too much.” You can say that again. It’s hazardous to your health to exchange punches with Maidana at all, period. He was beaten by a controversial 12 round decision against German based Kotelnik, but he punished the Ukrainian badly in that fight, bloodying his face and swelling it up.

This was a fight in which Kotelnik fought defensively from start to finish, yet he still took an enormous amount of punishment from Maidana. I’m not sure that Khan could take that same kind of punishment without folding.