By William Mackay: HBO analyst Larry Merchant thinks Amir Khan deserved to fight longer before the referee jumped in to stop the fight last Saturday night in his loss to WBC light welterweight champion Danny Garcia. Merchant thinks that referee Kenny Bayless should have allowed Khan the benefit of the doubt by letting him continue to fight after Khan had been knocked down twice in the 4th by the 24-year-old Garcia.

Speaking with examiner.com writer Chris Robinson, Merchant said “I think Amir deserved a little bit more time to show whether he could survive the round and if he did survive the round, whether he had enough composure and enough physical presence to fight back.”

Merchant believes that Khan could have made it out of the 4th round if the referee had allowed it to continue on. I have my doubts, but for the sake of argument lets suppose Khan could have made it through the remainder of the 4th round. Khan was in real bad shape and would have taken a lot of big head shots from Garcia before the round ended. Khan wasn’t fighting with any real sense, and trying to fight back instead of clinching. You have to imagine that Khan would continue to fight in a senseless manner in the 5th round. Khan’s legs were already rubbery in a way that suggested that they weren’t going to come back for him. This means that Khan’s power wouldn’t be there for the 5th, and without power Khan wouldn’t be able to slow Garcia’s forward momentum. We’d have seen a repeat of the 4th round with Khan taking terrifying punishment, and even if he could stay on his feet, he’d have taken too many head shots for the referee to allow the fight to continue.

It’s nice that Merchant thinks that Khan could have made it out of the 4th round, but where precisely was he going to go from there? He wasn’t going to win that fight, and would have likely gotten knocked cold in the 5th had the referee just let Garcia tee off on Khan as he was doing. I think it would have been interesting to watch, but not good for Khan’s long term health.

You’d like to think that his trainer Freddie Roach would do something to have the fight stopped by tossing in the while towel, but you just don’t know. Thankfully, the referee chose to halt the fight without letting Khan get his head caved in by Garcia. I think Merchant needs to watch the fight again in slow motion to see how badly Khan getting pummeled by Garcia.