By Scott Gilfoid: WBA Super World light welterweight champion Amir Khan (24-1, 17 KO’s) expects a large crowd of 20,000 fans to come see his April 16th fight against the little known EBU light welterweight champion Paul McCloskey (22-0, 12 KO’s) at the M.E.N. Arena, in Manchester, England.
The fight will be pay-per-view for fans in the UK, which hasn’t exactly endeared Khan to a lot of his fans because many of them don’t see this fight as PPV material. It’s hard to argue with that because anytime you have a champion like Khan handpicking an opponent that has never faced a top tier in his entire life like McCloskey you get the seeds for a rematch. This was the case with Khan’s fight against Dimitriy Salita in 2009, and now it seems that history is repeating itself with this fight.
Khan didn’t have much of a choice to fight Salita, because he was the mandatory challenger that the WBA put at the #1 spot for Khan. However, Khan did have a choice about whether to face McCloskey or not and instead of taking on guys like Lamont Peterson, Michael Katsidis, and Breidis Prescott, Khan and his management selected McCloskey.
In an interview at Sporting Life, Khan said “He’s [McCloskey] not in my class. I’m a world class fighter. My next step is [Timothy] Bradley. I want to take the 140 pound division to a new level. I’m glad to be coming home. I’ve had my last two fights in Las Vegas and New York and I know my fans have been dying to see me. There’s going to be 20,000 full house.”
Khan wanted to fight in the U.S. because he wanted to build a fan base there. He’s one good fighter over there thus far in Marcos Maidana, barely beating him, and one soft fighter in Paulie Malignaggi. Khan is now going back to fighting soft fighters in what appears to be another soft fighter in McCloskey.
It would seem more logical for Khan to stick to fighting quality guys so that it won’t be so much of a shock for him when he faces Bradley in the summer. What Khan should be doing right now is fighting a rematch with either Prescott or Maidana instead of fighting a guy like McCloskey.
When you get knocked out like Khan did in the Prescott fight, you have to fight the guy again to avenge the defeat, don’t you? And Khan needs to fight Maidana again to dispel the notion that many boxing fans have that Khan would have been knocked out in the last three rounds if the fight if there hadn’t had so many breaks in the action by the referee.
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