By William Mackay: IBF/WBA light welterweight champion Lamont Peterson (30-1-1, 15 KO’s) and Amir Khan (26-2, 18 KO’s) will be fighting a rematch on May 19th and this fight will hopefully quiet Khan and his fans about the controversy over the last fight in which Khan lost the fight by a 12 round split decision in Peterson’s home city.

Khan lost two points in that bout for pushing Peterson, which is a foul that is rarely called nowadays. It’s a foul that is technically a foul but it’s become an acceptable foul where the referees tend to look the other way. I don’t understand how they could look the other way because it gives the fighter using the foul a big advantage because they don’t have to learn how to fight on the inside like normal fighters do. If you’re allowed to push then you can just shove your opponent away when they try to get inside on you like Khan was doing in his fight against Peterson last December.

Peterson said this to Fighthbtv: “You can say they’ve never taken points away for a championship fight for pushing, but I challenge anyone to show me someone that pushed that much, for the reasons he was pushing. And you can call it pushing, but I’m calling it elbows to the face, and you should be getting points taken away for that…It’s a foul. These pushes did damage and pulling on the back of my head. I went to the hospital after the fight. I had big swelling in the neck area [from Khan’s pulling down on his head]…You can call it what you want, but at the end of the day, he was fouling, he was penalized for it and I won the fight.”

I completely agree with Peterson. Khan shoved Peterson over 50 times in the fight and who knows how many times he pulled down on Peterson’s head when he got close.