By Michael Collins: It appears that Amir Khan’s two-year campaign to try and talk his way into a mega fight with Floyd Mayweather Jr. may have been for naught as Mayweather expressed displeasure with Khan’s fighting style in his last fight against Lamont Peterson and felt that Khan should have been disqualified in the fight, which turned out to be a loss for Khan.
Mayweather said this about Khan as quoted by fighthype.com on Tuesday “I don’t know too much about Amir Khan. I think he does too much running and holding. I honestly feel he should have been disqualified [against Peterson].”
That must really hurt Khan, because what Mayweather is saying here is that Khan has a fighting style that he doesn’t find appealing as a potential future opponent. You can spin it to mean that Mayweather is afraid of Khan if you want, but I think you’d be wrong. What Mayweather is saying here is that he’s not interested in fighting a guy like Khan that runs all around the ring with his hit and run fighting style and who does quite a bit of holding when his opponent gets close enough to throw punches.
It’s like Khan wants to punch but when it comes to his opponents punching back, he’s going to run or hold to keep them from getting their punches off. What Mayweather didn’t touch on was Khan’s shoving, which he did quite a bit of in his fight with Peterson.
Khan lost two points for this fouling technique and you really can’t blame the referee for doing it because Khan was leaning forward and really giving Peterson hard shoves when he was trying to get in close to work and it didn’t look like Peterson was leading with this head. It just looked like Khan didn’t like the pressure and had found an alternative route to escape the pressure by shoving Peterson across the ring.
Khan says he’s about to move up in weight to the welterweight division if he can’t get the Peterson rematch and will continue his chase of Mayweather. But I think Khan needs to listen to what Mayweather is saying here and make some huge changes to his fighting style if he wants to get a Mayweather fight.
Here are the things Khan needs to change for him to have a better chance of fighting Mayweather someday:
• Headlocks – Khan needs to stop putting his opponents into headlocks when they get close.
• Shoving – this isn’t boxing; this is some king of MMA technique that khan has been using and getting away with until the Peterson fight.
• Holding and hitting – Khan does this from time to time in a lot of his fights. He was able to stop Zab Judah by holding his head down with his left arm and hitting him on the beltline with his right while still having his head down. The referee completely missed the foul and Khan got away with it.
• Pulling down on his opponents’ heads – This more than anything is something Khan needs to stop doing. It looks amateurish and it’s not a good method to escape inside pressure. It just looks like fouling. I’ve seen a lot of other British fighters do this but Khan does it a lot more and gets away with it. He needs to stop to be more appealing for Mayweather.
• Running – If he wants the Mayweather fight, Khan is going to have to stop running like a chicken that just got it’s head cut off. There is moving around the ring, which is what Mayweather does, and then there is actual running and that’s what Khan does. He needs to limit his lateral movement.