By William Mackay: Earlier today, IBF/WBA light welterweight champion Amir Khan asked on his twitter page why WBA light welterweight champion Marcos Maidana didn’t receive any criticism for fight against Petr Petrov last weekend while Khan took massive stick for facing Zab Judah recently.

Maidana answered back on his twitter, saying “Cause you run scared for me, that’s why. For the Queen’s fans. It’s not me talking about here, she always start mentioning my name and I’ll always answer every-time she does.”

As you can tell, Maidana have a lot of respect for Khan. The reason is because Khan wants no part of a rematch with Maidana, even though Khan took a terrible battering in his 12 round decision win over Maidana last December in a fight that was picked as the fight of the year. Usually when you get a fight as exciting at the Khan-Maidana fight was, both fighters want to get back in the ring and fight a rematch. Maidana wants to, but Khan doesn’t want to fight Maidana again. Instead, Khan has faced Paul McCloskey and Zab Judah since then. Neither of those fights were anywhere close to being as exciting as the Maidana vs. Khan fight, and they were never expected to be. No one thought McCloskey-Khan would be competitive, and it wasn’t. That was a fight that Khan wanted instead of Maidana. And Judah only had a knockout chance to win going into his fight with Khan, because Judah’s workrate has dropped off significantly in recent years.

The Khan-Maidana fight was controversial as it was, because of the referee Joe Cortez constantly breaking the action in the last three rounds when Maidana had Khan hurt. Before then, Cortez was pretty much staying out of the way of the two fighters. However, when Khan was hurt and taking punishment, Cortez picked the absolute worst times to break up the action when a hurt Khan was taking severe punishment by Maidana along the ropes. Had Cortez just let Maidana continue to work, it’s possible that Maidana would have knocked Khan out.