By Scott Gilfoid: IBF welterweight champion Kell Brook’s promoter Eddie Hearn of Matchroom Sport will be meeting with Amir Khan (31-3, 19 KOs) next week to put together a fight between him and Brook for next Summer.
Hearn believes that he can have the negotiations completed by next week for a mega-fight in the UK. Hearn notes that Khan didn’t get the important fight that he was hoping to bag against Filipino star Manny Pacquiao, so now all he has left is a fight against his fighter Brook (35-0, 24 KOs).
“I have said to Amir that if we don’t get this sorted in the next couple of weeks we will miss the boat for a summer fight,” Hearn said to sports360.com. “Amir’s not got the Pacquiao fight.”
Hearn had better hope that he can make the fight with Khan, because Brook doesn’t have much more time before he’s going to need to defend his IBF welterweight title against the best young talent in the 147lb division in Errol Spence Jr. That young talent is like a giant asteroid heading towards Brook and Hearn and there’s nothing that the two of them can do to cause him to veer away or blow up before he gets to them. The only thing that Hearn and Brook can do is try as hard as they can to get at least one big money fight against Khan before Spence collides into Brook, and sends him back to contender status.
I have a feeling that Brook is going to vacate his IBF title before that happens though, because we’re already hearing that Brook only has two more fights left at 147 before he moves up in weight to 154. That tells me that Brook will use those last two fights to face Kevin Bizier, his IBF ordered mandatory challenger, and then Khan.
The thing is if Brook doesn’t get the fight against Khan, then he’s going to find himself facing Spence and I don’t think he or Hearn want that fight to happen. That’s a nightmarish type of fight for Brook, because Spence arguably does everything that Brook does but much, much better.
It’s finally come to this for Khan. He’s exhausted all of his attempts to get a big money fight against the two biggest stars of the sport, Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather Jr., and now the only thing that’s left for the 29-year-old Khan is to face the 29-year-old Brook before the two of them age out and start getting whipped by the other top fighters in the 147lb division.
In a way, Brook and Khan are very similar in terms of the poor opposition that they’ve been fighting in the last three years of their careers. The match-making for the two fighters has been gawd awful, which has probably the only reason that they haven’t been beaten during that time.
“I always felt Brook is the obvious choice, but Mayweather and Pacquiao were big fights for Khan and now they are not happening,” Hearn said.
Hearn had better hope that this goes well for his fighter Brook, because he’s been yapping about wanting the Khan match-up for years and years. Sometimes when you finally get what you’ve been blabbering about for ages, it doesn’t work out well. In Brook’s case, he could wind up getting exposed by Khan as a slow fighter without much flexibility in his upper body, and poor ability to move around the ring.
Brook isn’t a very good fighter on the outside, and he won’t be able to beat Khan in a battle of jabs. Further, Brook won’t be able to count on clinching Khan all night long to win a punch and grab type of fight like he did against Shawn Porter last year, because Khan doesn’t fight on the inside like Porter does. This means that clinching won’t be something that Brook will be able to depend on to steal an ugly win like he did against Porter.
If Brook wins this fight against Khan, he’s going to need to do it with his boxing skills, and I’m not sure that he has the skills needed to do the job against him. Indeed, I think Brook is a very average fighter who depends on beating stationary fighters that he uses his weight advantage against.
“Brook one million per cent wants the fight, now I believe Khan wants the fight, so we will meet next week and I believe we will get the deal done,” Hearn said.
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