By Dan Ambrose: Amir Khan (31-3, 19 KOs) is totally confident that he’ll send the younger 25-year-old Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (46-1-1, 32 KOs) down to his second career defeat on May 7 in their fight on HBO PPV. Khan says he’s not going to let a younger, smaller fighter like Canelo beat him. What Khan isn’t sure about is whether he should keep the WBC middleweight title he wins off Golden Boy Promotion’s flagship fighter Canelo or not.
If Khan chooses to keep the WBC strap, it’s going to come with a great responsibility because he’ll need to defend the belt against the WBC #1 mandatory challenger Gennady “GGG” Golovkin (34-0, 31 KOs) in his very next fight. Khan says he’s not sure whether he’ll do that or not. He wants to beat Canelo, and then make a decision with his team based on how he performed in the fight against Canelo.
“I want to fight the best names in the world,” said Khan to fighthype.com. “At the moment, Kell Brook doesn’t belong there, so that’s why the fight didn’t happen. If you compare the two names Kell Brook and Saul Alvarez, it shows your why I am fighting the likes of Alvarez rather than Kell Brook. It’s hard to talk about [fighting Golovkin]. Once I beat Canelo, I think that we’ll sit down with my team and see where we go from there. Look, this fight at 155 could be the best weight for me. I never fought at 155, but we always sparred at 155 where I’ve hurt sparring partners. I’ve knocked own sparring partners,” said Khan.
If Khan does beat Canelo, it’s going to be awfully hard for him to turn down a fight against Golovkin because that’s a fight that could potentially make Khan a tremendous amount of money if he can stage the fight at the Wembley Stadium in London, England. If the Khan-Golovkin fight can take place in front of 80,000 fans at Wembley Stadium, it could make Khan a bundle of money, especially if the fight is sold on PPV in the UK.
Khan could make more money than he’s ever made before during his career. He might lose the fight but he would get well paid for his efforts, and it would likely be much more money than he could get fighting someone else like Danny Garcia or Kell Brook. Just by taking on Golovkin in his next fight, Khan would win the respect of a lot of boxing fans, and he’d get his name out there because he would receive a ton of attention due to the fight being televised in the UK and in the U.S.
“My power has always been there with me,” said Khan. “I’ve always fought at my real weight, but in recent years, I used to kill myself making weight because my body just grew and I was always kind of dehydrating myself. You lose a lot of power by dehydrating yourself. Naturally, I think this could be the right weight for me. I just don’t known yet. I expected Canelo to be huge when I walked into the press conference. I was bigger than him. Maybe he was a little bit wider than me, but I was taller than him. So I didn’t see him being the big monster everyone said he is. He’s a little big younger than me. This is the first time I’m fighting someone younger than me and I’m not the favorite. This is going to be quite exciting. I’m not going to let a young guy beat me,” said Khan.
Khan will no doubt have the ability to out-box Canelo in this fight because he’s clearly the better fighter than the Mexican star, who has already been exposed in fights against Austin Trout, Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Erislandy Lara. The main question mark about Khan is whether or not he’ll have the chin to take the big power shots that Canelo will be hitting him on occasion.
It’s probably not realistic to think that Khan can get through an entire 12 round bout with getting nailed a number of times by very hard punches from Canelo. However, the more that Khan can limit those occasions the better chance he’ll have of winning the fight. Mayweather was only hit once really hard by Canelo in their fight in 2013. That was in the 9th round, when Canelo timed Mayweather and nailed him with a big left hook. From that point on, Mayweather got on his bike and jabbed and moved.
Canelo got a lot of confidence from this and started coming forward a lot more. Canelo was effective in the last four rounds of the fight with Mayweather no longer staying in the pocket. I think Khan is going to need to be able to stand in the pocket against Canelo a certain amount of time in reach round because if he doesn’t do this, Canelo is going to chase him like a dog and win rounds based on aggression.
Khan is going to need to show the judges that he can stop Canelo from walking him down because they’re just going to give the more popular Canelo rounds based on forward movement and pressure like they did in his questionable win over Erislandy Lara in 2014. The judges that work these fights tend to score rounds more for the fighters that put pressure on their opponents and less for the fighters that are boxing and looking smart.
I think popularity of a fighter has a great deal to do with how the judges score fights. It seems like the more popular fighters get rounds given to them automatically if the rounds are close. This means that Khan is going to need to do a certain amount of actual fighting in each round if he doesn’t want to found himself on the receiving end of a Lara-type controversial decision loss on May 7. Lara boxed Canelo’s head off in their fight in 2014, but the judges were mainly looking at aggression rather than on ring generalship, so two of them gave it to Canelo despite him appearing to have been beaten.
Comments are closed.