By William Mackay: If WBA light welterweight champion Amir Khan (24-1, 17 KO’s) can beat his hand-picked next opponent Paul McCloskey (22-0, 12 KO’s) in April, it will put the 24-year-old Khan on course to meet up with WBC/WBO light welterweight champion Timothy Bradley (27-0, 11 KO’s) in an important unification bout this summer on July 23rd at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino, in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Although Khan likes to fight in the UK, he’ll have to make this one in the U.S. if he wants to try and build a following here. This will be a very big fight for Khan, because it will give him three of the title belts in his possession should he beat Bradley. There will only be one belt remaining and that’s the IBF title belt that will be fought over by Kaizer Mabuza and Zab Judah next month on March 5th.
If Khan defeats Bradley, he likely won’t bother messing around with Judah or Mabuza, and will instead move up in weight to welterweight. Khan said he wants to fight Breidis Prescott before moving up, but I see that as lip service by Khan. I highly doubt he’ll ever try and avenge the defeat to Prescott.
Bradley, 27, defeated Devon Alexander by a 10th round technical decision on January 29th in a fight where neither Bradley nor Alexander looked particularly good. Bradley stunk up the joint a little less than Alexander, and was the one applying pressure all night.
Khan recently defeated Marcos Maidana, and looked horrible in taking terrible punishment in the last three rounds of that fight. Khan won by a 12 round decision but he might have been knocked out had referee Joe Cortez not broken up the action so many times while Khan was in bad shape and taking one-sided punishment on inside in the 10th through 12th rounds. The stoppages in action seemed to do just enough to allow Khan to survive.
Comments are closed.