Rivals Amir Khan and Kell Brook finally trade blows in February, a full seven years from when the all-UK fight should have gotten made.
Nonetheless, the event is on. And British fans showed their support by snapping up tickets for the grudge match in record time.
Khan and Brook will settle a decade-long rivalry at Manchester Arena. Both are ready to check out their careers with a lovely farewell payday.
It certainly won’t be the same fight it would have if both had agreed to collide in 2015 or 2016. It was a time when Khan and Brook turned away from each other to secure enormous middleweight challenges well above their capabilities.
A game Khan got wiped out by Canelo in May 2016. Four months later, Brook got crushed by Golovkin.
Since then, the UK welterweight stars have never been the same.
Highly vulnerable and taking long breaks from the sport, Khan and Brook are no longer considered any threat to many of the top ten fighters at 147.
Therefore, it will be a completely different affair. It will probably be over a lot quicker than, say, those six or seven years ago.
Back then, both men were highly-ranked or world champions in their own right. Any collision in those lofty days would have been very competitive and had a high possibility of going the distance.
Now, with stoppage losses of their records since then, Khan and Brook will potentially engage in a firefight. It may come down to who has taken lesser punishment in their careers.
AMIR KHAN KNOCKOUT
For my money, that’s Amir Khan.
His speed and elusiveness also mean the Bolton man has better mobility than Brook. The latter has seemed significantly flatfooted in more than one of his most recent outings.
Brook’s questionable lifestyle outside the ring is also a factor, coupled with two depressed eye-socket fractures of his face inflicted by Golovkin and Errol Spence.
Effectively, the Sheffield man’s competitive career was put to bed by ‘GGG.’ Since then, he’s been a shadow of his former self and struggled with outside influences.
Khan can capitalize on all those factors in the fight and has the skills even to end it within the first six rounds. The ‘King’ of Bolton might have to pick himself up off the canvas in the process, though.
‘Special K’ will know he may only have a couple of rounds at his peak to get Khan out of there. The ex-IBF champion would get best advised to risk it all from the very first bell.
Phil Jay – Editor of World Boxing News since 2010 with over one billion views. Follow WBN on Twitter @WorldBoxingNews.
