Khan-McCloskey: Paul needs to focus on throwing uppercuts and temple shots

By Boxing News - 03/18/2011 - Comments

Image: Khan-McCloskey: Paul needs to focus on throwing uppercuts and temple shotsBy William Mackay: If unbeaten Irish challenger Paul McCloskey (22-0, 12 KO’s) wants to beat WBA Super World light welterweight champion Amir Khan (24-1, 17 KO’s) next month in their fight at the M.E.N. Arena, in Manchester, England, McCloskey needs to throw a lot of uppercuts down the middle and hard left hands to the temples of Khan.

In Khan’s last fight against Marcos Maidana, Khan was exposed for having very little defense against uppercuts at close range. He also was hurt by a hard temple shot from Maidana that whip-lashed Khan’s head around and started his problems in the 10th. Once Khan was hurt, he was completely ineffective for the remainder of the fight, spending large amounts of time holding onto either the back of Maidana’s neck with both hands or one of his arms to keep him from punching.

Strangely enough, Khan was never penalized in the last three rounds when all of these tactics where going on and between these survival moves and the constant breaking of the action at close range when Khan getting pummeled by Maidana, Khan was able to survive and finish the fight on his feet.

McCloskey will be studying the Khan-Maidana fight and will note the things that I and Timothy Bradley noticed with Khan’s inability to stop Maidana’s undercuts. If I’m McCloskey, I’m spending a good portion of every training day working on uppercuts and working on how to free myself from having Khan grabbing me around the neck. I’m also going to work on things like continuing to punch when one of my arms are being held, and how to deal with getting shoved hard in the chest. Beyond these things, McCloskey has to get good at cutting off the ring because he’s going to need to be able to halt Khan’s circular running to force him to fight. If Khan is allowed to run around the ring throwing jabs all night, he’ll win a fairly easy decision. McCloskey needs to cut him off and make him stop quickly to change directions. The constant stopping will weaken Khan’s slender legs and cause him to tire out a lot quicker.



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