By William Mackay: Former super middleweight champion Joe Calzaghe is picking Amir Khan to easily beat IBF/WBA light welterweight champion Lamont Peterson in their rematch on May 19th. Calzaghe is parroting the 25-year-old Khan by saying that Peterson fought as well as he possibly could in beating him by a 12 round split decision last December in Washington, DC. Calzaghe doesn’t think Peterson did enough to win that fight, but he also believes that Peterson can’t fight any better than that in the rematch.

Calzaghe told Ifilm London “In the rematch will be close? I don’t think so. Amir will learn by his mistakes. He’ll use his speed and movement a lot more and not get on the ropes and get tangled into a fight. I can see him winning possibly by a stoppage. I think he can stop Peterson in the rematch. I think Peterson fought out of his skin.”

I disagree with Calzaghe completely. Khan can’t use any more movement than he used last time because it wore him out running around the ring in the second half of the fight. Khan was totally gassed from running. If you look at Peterson, he was actually jogging after Khan. He wasn’t plodding after him; he was jogging to catch up to him and doing a really good job of closing the distance. Khan was expending tons of energy going backwards and side to side. It’s much harder on a person’s stamina to job backwards or laterally than it is for someone to be jogging forward the way people are designed to run.

This is why Khan was completely gassed and desperate to the point where he was shoving constantly and pulling down on Peterson’s head even with the referee warning him to stop. That’s desperation. If Calzaghe thinks Khan can run anymore than he did last time then he needs to sit down and watch their December fight again, because Khan couldn’t run anymore than he did.

Peterson was doing such a great job of jobbing to points to cut off the ring on Khan, forcing him to fight or run in the opposite way. It was easy for Peterson. The only thing that made things difficult for Peterson was all the fouling that Khan was doing with the shoving and grabbing him by the head to either pull on it or wrap him in a headlock. Peterson would chase Khan and get to him but would often get shoved away or grabbed by the head and pulled forward. If Khan only did these tactics occasionally then it wouldn’t have been a big deal, but if you look at the fight in the second half, Khan using these fouls over and over again.