By Scott Gilfoid: WBA light welterweight champion Amir Khan got some really bad news today when it was learned that his former conqueror Breidis Prescott (24-2, 19 KO’s), who is ranked #6 by the World Boxing Association, will be fighting the lighting hitting, slow-handed Paul McCloskey (22-1, 12 KO’s) on September 10th in a WBA light welterweight title eliminator bout at the Odyssey Arena, in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

What this means then, of course, is that Khan will have to hurry and get his fights in quickly and vacate his WBA title before he’s literally forced to fight the winner of the Prescott-McCloskey fight, which obviously will be Prescott by a brutal knockout. I usually don’t like to count out fighters, but in this case I have to. McCloskey has no chance whatsoever of surviving 12 rounds against the murderous punching Prescott.

This is going to be a slaughter oft he first order. I don’t expect UK boxing fans to understand this because their last memory of Prescott was him chasing around Kevin Mitchell for 12 rounds and losing to him. Prescott has improved dramatically since then and is using his devastating jab frequently now and is also a lot more mobile than he was in the past. Prescott doesn’t go looking exclusively for knockouts like he did in the past. His power still makes him a constant threat to knock his opponents cold, but he’s much more versatile than he was in the past and his jab makes him a much better fighter. Prescott will walk right through McCloskey’s weak shots and destroy him in short order to become the mandatory for Khan. You can bank on that. But it really doesn’t, though, because Khan will probably never fight Prescott.

Khan will vacate long before he’s forced to fight him. Khan’s people obviously want no part of Prescott because if they did he would have fought him in a rematch a long time ago. Instead, Prescott will end up facing the number #2 guy in the WBA rankings, which is currently Bruno Zamora and wipe him out to become the champion.

Khan, in the mean time, will move up to the welterweight division and get humiliated by Floyd Mayweather Jr. by knockout. Khan will then have a lot of pressure to move back down in weight to fight Prescott. That won’t happen, because Khan’s handlers will want to match him soft for a year or so to build his confidence back up. It’s going to be like a replay of when Khan knocked out in the past by Prescott. Khan was then matched softly for the next year before finally put in with some moderately talented fighters to pick up a paper title at WBA with a win over Andriy Kotelnik.