(Photo credit: Lucas Noonan/Premier Boxing Champions) By Scott Gilfoid: Former IBF/WBC/WBO featherweight champion Naseem Hamed believes that Amir Khan (31-3, 19 KOs) will give Floyd Mayweather Jr. (48-0, 26 KOs) more problems next September than Mayweather’s last 10 opponents have given him.
In other words, Naseem sees Khan as giving Mayweather more problems than Manny Pacquiao, Marcos Maidana, Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, Robert Guerrero, Miguel Cotto, Victor Ortiz, Shane Mosley, Juan Manuel Marquez, Ricky Hatton and Oscar De La Hoya. Those are Mayweather’s last ten opponents.
Hamed didn’t come out and say that he thinks that Khan is better than those ten fighters, but it seems that’s the direction he’s going in by saying that Khan will give Mayweather more problems than those guys. I can’t agree with Khan giving Mayweather more problems than most of those guys did, and I definitely don’t see Khan beating the likes of Maidana, Canelo, Cotto or Pacquiao.
Marquez has got a knee problem and might not ever fight against. Mosley is over-the-hill at 42, and De La Hoya and Hatton are retired. Guerrero and Ortiz look like they’ve seen better days.
Khan will give Mayweather “a harder fight than his last ten opponents”, Hamed said via the Telegraph.co.uk. “I want to see Amir fight Kell Brook and I want that to be an all-British bash at Wembley. I just don’t see why Amir is overlooking Kell Brook. You’ve got a world champion on your doorstep with a legitimate belt in your weight category. People in this country want to see who is the best.”
Mayweather hasn’t said who he plans on fighting on September 12th, but if he chooses Khan, he’s going to take a lot of criticism from boxing fans because they don’t believe Khan has earned the fight due to his performance against Chris Algieri. They also don’t think Khan has faced a quality fighter since he was beaten by Danny Garcia in 2012.
I think Canelo, Maidana and Pacquiao would absolutely destroy Khan. I don’t think those would be competitive fights. I’m not sure if Hamed watched Khan’s last fight against Chris Algieri on May 29th, but if he did, he’d have noticed that Khan looked horrible, and clueless. He was exposed in that fight as being a weak welterweight fighting out of his division.
Khan should be fighting at 140, because he clearly doesn’t have the punching power to be fighting the good welterweights with power or size. Maidana would destroy Khan if they were to face each other without a referee to get in between the two fighters the way that Joe Cortez kept doing in their 2010 fight.
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