By William Mackay: WBA light welterweight champion Amir Khan (24-1, 17 KO’s) thinks that Sky Sports will be sorry that they didn’t keep his fight against Paul McCloskey (22-0, 12 KO’s) on Sky pay-per-view this Saturday rather than moving it to Sky 3, which is a non-PPV channel. Khan promises to beat McCloskey by convincingly manner in front of what will likely be a sold out M.E.N. Arena in Manchester, England.

As quoted by thesun.co.uk, Khan said “I am a big box office fighter and it is shown by the demand there is to screen my fights in America with HBO screening my bout with McCloskey. People at Sky will be wishing they had this fight against McCloskey because I think I can produce a devastating performance.”

Sky took the Khan fight off their PPV channel because the advance sales for the Khan-McCloskey fight were underwhelming and the undercard had fallen apart with Matthew Macklin suddenly pulling out and Tyson Fury – Hasim Rahman fight not happening as well. Khan is convinced that his bout with McCloskey deserves to be on PPV, and has since moved it to another network, Primetime PPV. The switch from Sky 3 to Primetime will mean a lot less fans will see Khan-McCloskey and it could be seen by as few as only 4000 fans, possibly a little more than that. Even if the fight brings in slightly more, you would have to think that Khan would have been better off having the fight be shown on Sky 3 so that he could reach more fans. The money that Khan receives for the fight from Primetime likely won’t be that much more than what he was going to get from Sky, and it seems as if Khan is shooting himself in the foot by insisting that the fight deserves PPV recognition.

Khan will likely beat McCloskey by a “devastating performance” like he says, but so what? We’re talking about a fighter that has never faced top tier opposition before. If you select for inexperienced fighters without much power or hand speed like McCloskey, is it any wonder that Khan will knock him out in a devastating fashion? Khan would have been better off taking a risk by at least trying to avenge his 1st round knockout defeat by Breidis Prescott. At least if Khan were to knock him out in devastating fashion, it would impress boxing fans because Prescott has fought top tier opposition during his career and holds a previous knockout win over Khan.