By Scott Gilfoid: The Amir Khan (27-3, 19 KO’s) vs. Julio Diaz (40-7-1, 29 KO’s) will be taking place on April 27th at the Motorpoint Arena, Sheffield, Yorkshire, United Kingdom. This fight may not count as part of Khan’s three-fight deal with Showtime, according to Dan Rafael. It’s still unclear if it’ll count as one of their fights, even though Showtime still plans on televising it, so they might as well count it if they’re going to be televising it.
No matter how you look at this fight, it’s really hard to take it seriously because it’s such a dreadful mismatch on paper. I thought Diaz was a damn good fighter seven years ago, but that was then and a lot of things have changed since then in terms of him aging and looking terrible for many years.
Right now, Diaz isn’t even a 1st tier top 15 ranked welterweight contender; he’s a 2nd tier and that means this fight is just another extension of Khan’s tune-up fights to get his career back on track after he was beaten by Danny Garcia and Lamont Peterson.
Khan had been doing pretty well in beating the likes of Marcos Maidana, Zab Judah, Andriy Kotelnik, Paulie Malignaggi and Paul McCloskey, but when Khan stepped it up against a better class of fighter in Garcia and Peterson, he was exposed again.
I mean, Khan barely beat Maidana and probably would have been knocked out had there been a less hands on referee that chose the weirdest times to separate Khan and Maidana during exchanges.
The only positive I can see of Diaz is he fought a 10 round draw in his last fight against Shawn Porter last December, and that’s about it. He’s getting the fight off of a draw, and that’s pretty sad because Diaz has done nothing for years in terms of facing top tier opposition. He tried facing some top tier fighters in the last three years but was beaten by Victor Cayo and Kendall Holt.
I suppose Khan’s British fans will be happy to see him fighting in the UK again because it’s been two years since the last time Khan fought there, and he’ll probably sell out the Motorpoint Arena no problem even though the fight is hardly an appealing one. The British public pretty doesn’t care who Khan fights; they’ll show up droves to see the mismatch.
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