By William Mackay: Apparently trainer Virgil Hunter has been using junior middleweight Alfredo Angulo (20-2, 17 KO’s) as a sparring partner to help former IBF/WBA light welterweight champion Amir Khan (26-3, 18 KO’s) get ready for his December 15th fight against Carlos Molina (17-0, 7 KO’s) at the Sports Arena in Los Angeles, California. Khan is struggling according to Hunter.
Hunter said to esnewsreport.com “He [Angulo] puts tremendous physical and mental pressure on you and Khan isn’t having an easy time with Perro [Angulo].”
Hunter went onto say that Khan needs a lot of work on his skinny neck, which Hunter believes is part of the reason why Khan has suffered knockout losses to Breidis Prescott and Danny Garcia. Hunter wants to have Khan put on two inches in size on his neck and he thinks this will help keep Khan’s head from snapping back so hard when he gets hit. It sounds like a reasonably good plan but it may not keep Khan from getting knocked out. There’s no medical information behind the theory that having a stronger neck leads to less knockouts, because there have been plenty of fighters with thick necks who couldn’t handle a hard shot.
Putting Khan in with Angulo could help him a lot more than all these neck exercises because Angulo is a great pressure fighter and if Khan can learn how to handle pressure from a big fighter like Angulo then it should help him against smaller, less powerful light welterweights that don’t have the same kind of power or size that Angulo has. But it’s a different story though because Khan’s training with headgear and over-sized gloves with Angulo, and those things aren’t there to protect Khan in his light welterweight bouts.
Molina doesn’t have a lot of power and Khan should be able to win this fight. Molina is the type of guy that Khan can beat, although there’s definitely a possibility that Khan could get knocked out from Molina. But Khan’s real problems will surface once he starts facing big punchers at 140.
Danny Garcia destroyed Khan last July, and Khan is already talking about wanting a rematch against Garcia in a rematch next year. I don’t care how much sparring Khan does with Angulo and how much neck size he puts on, he’s still going to have big problems when he faces a live opponent with power.
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