By Dan Ambrose: Golden Boy Promotions CEO Oscar De La Hoya is talking up Amir Khan’s chances if his golden goose WBC middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez fails to stay focused for 12 rounds.
De La Hoya believes that Khan could take control of the fight and win in the same way that Manny Pacquiao was able to beat him many years ago in 2008 in their PPV fight. De La Hoya came into the fight weight drained from having dropped to 147, and Pacquiao took advantage of the situation by giving him a battering until the fight was halted in the 8th.
“That can happen if a fighter isn’t 100 per cent or doesn’t have the capability of having the perfect strategy. It’s up to Canelo Alvarez,” De La Hoya said via skysports.com. “If he can stay focused he obviously has a great shot of winning, but if he gets it slightly off, a lot can go wrong.”
It’s unclear if De La Hoya really believes Khan has a chance to win the fight or if he’s just saying this to help attract interest in the fight. It was De La Hoya’s idea to hand-pick a welterweight for Canelo to fight rather than a middleweight or even a junior middleweight. This is one of those real long shot fights where the two fighters are so far apart in terms of weight that it’s hard to picture the fight as being competitive. Welterweight Sugar Ray Leonard moved up in weight in 1987 to defeat middleweight champion Marvin Hagler, but that was a controversial win for Leonard. A lot of boxing fans felt that Hagler was robbed. He never fought again after that fight. It’s doubtful that Khan will be given the decision the way Leonard was because he’s not highly popular like Leonard, and there’s a big imbalance in that department. Canelo is the Leonard type star in this fight, and that means Khan is going to have to do something very special to get the win. He can’t count on winning a controversial decision like Leonard did.
If Khan is able to use his speed and movement, then he has a great chance of duplicating what Floyd Mayweather Jr. did to Canelo in 2013. Erislandy Lara showed that he could follow the Mayweather blueprint as well in his fight against Canelo in 2014. Where Lara messed things up for himself was when he failed to throw enough punches in the second half of the fight. Khan will need to make sure he’s not just moving around the ring if he wants to win. He’s got to be able to throw and land shots to have a chance to get the victory. With Canelo being the aggressor and throwing the harder shots, the judges are likely going to give him the benefit of the doubt in many rounds just on that alone.
Khan has to land more clean shots to have a chance to pull off the upset. He can’t just depend on landing slightly more shots. He’s probably going to need to out-land Canelo three to one in every round to have a chance of winning. The fight is the United States where Canelo is a huge star, and he means a lot for the sport. It’s not a good thing for Canelo to lose the fight because he’s capable of bringing in big crowds to Las Vegas. You have to figure that Canelo will be starting the fight with a four round advantage over Khan right off the bat. It’ll be up to Khan to try and even things out as the fight goes along.
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