By William Mackay: Trainer Freddie Roach thinks his fighter WBA light welterweight champion Amir Khan (23-1, 17 KO’s) really has the number of his opponent Marcos Maidana (29-1, 27 KO’s) for their fight this Saturday night in Las Vegas. Roach thinks Khan will out-box Maidana and eventually take him out late in the fight.

Roach, who usually does a lot of bragging about his fighters ahead of time leading up to a big fight, had this to say about the Khan-Maidana fight in an interview at the mirror.co.uk, “The [Andriy] Kotelnik fight was a great fight for us because we beat the guy in every round. We dominated him in every round and I feel we will do that in this fight too. I don’t see us losing a round in this fight either.”

Roach seems to be getting things twisted by assuming that because Khan was able to dominate the smaller, weak-punching Kotelnik that it translates to the same kind of win against the much bigger punching and taller Maidana. For a trainer that’s supposed to know about boxing, Roach sounds like a novice. Maidana is taller than Kotelnik at 5’9″ compared to 5’7″, and hits much harder. You can’t compare a weak puncher like Kotelnik to Maidana and assume that the fragile-chinned Khan will be able to dominate Maidana because he dominated Kotelnik. That’s not logical.

Miguel Diaz, the trainer for Maidana, said “There was nothing special about Amir winning and nothing special about Maidana losing. That fight doesn’t make any difference to this one. It does not bear any correlation to this fight.”

I agree with Diaz. I think Roach doesn’t have much ammunition to throw at Maidana for this fight and is forced to really grab at straws to make his fighter Khan look better than he really is. I saw both the Maidana-Kotelnik fight and the Khan-Kotelnik bout, and I thought Maidana did a much better job on Kotelnik. He had Kotelnik bloodied and battered by the end of the fight, with a nose that looked to be badly broken. Kotelnik came out of the Khan fight merely red faced from fatigue and the sting of jabs. There’s no comparison between what Maidana did to Kotelnik and what Khan. I had Maidana beating Kotelnik by four rounds, but the fight took place in Germany where Kotelnik fights out of.