Bell could soon toll for Amir Khan as he takes on well-paid boxing punchbag, writes Dan Jones

At 31 years old, having not boxed for two years, facing a Canadian journeyman without a serious win on his ledger, and with his own last fight a sickening knockout at the hands of one of the hardest punchers around, Amir Khan has been telling interviewers he is at the peak of his career.

Who knows, maybe it feels that way. But to neutral observers, it looks like Khan’s bout against Phil Lo Greco in Liverpool this weekend is the beginning of the endgame in a career that has never delivered quite as much as it promised.

Last time Khan played to a TV audience, he was a contestant on I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here, earning his supper being tormented by bugs, snakes and Ant & Dec.

The time before that he was eating canvas in Las Vegas, after a predictable and brutal defeat to Saul ‘Canelo’ Alvarez in May 2016.

Back then, Canelo did to Khan what a good, heavy middleweight should always do to a guy who began his career at lightweight. He put him to sleep with an overhand right for the ages.

The sight of the Mexican on his knees beside his dazed and contused opponent, checking for vital signs rather than leaping around in celebration, did the fight game no favours and had many salty old observers predicting that Khan was done and dusted.

There is only one point to the Lo Greco fight: to ensure that this opinion is temporarily reversed.

Photo: Rex

Lo Greco troubled Khan in the theatre of the press conference by taking the mickey out of his socially mediated marriage. It would be a disaster if he troubled him inside the ropes on Saturday night.

No, Lo Greco has been hired by Khan’s new promoter, Eddie Hearn, to be a well-paid punchbag. A good win, screened live and unrestricted on Sky Sports, is the primer for the long-touted Khan fight with Matchroom’s other mixed-up welterweight, Kell Brook.

And then, god willing, a rousing finale against either Brook (again) or Khan’s former Hollywood sparring partner, Manny Pacquiao. After which it might well be time to say farewell.

This, at least, is the dream. But it also illustrates the problem with Khan. Too good (we assume) for the Lo Grecos of this world, he has wandered readily and often from the structured career progression that would have made him an elite fighter rather than a nearly-was. He has lost to fighters he didn’t oughta: Breidis Prescott in 2008; Danny Garcia in 2012.

He has taken some rum advice. He has ignored a lot of good advice: from his one-time coach Freddie Roach, in particular. He has come to recognise his faults — two low hands that leave him exposed in defence, an inability to resist rushing into wars — but never found a way to eradicate or work around them.

Since 2011, he has never fought more than twice in a year — and in that long period of inactivity the world has passed him by.

He says he took the suicide mission against Canelo – who was last night hit with a six-month doping ban – because he couldn’t make a fight with either Floyd Mayweather Jr or Pacquiao. He has long disdained the idea of fighting Brook — a no-brainer that could have been a great trilogy before both men faded — as somehow infra dig.

Yet, Khan still speaks of fighting Pacquiao as though that is a serious bout, despite the fact that Pacquiao is obviously a beatable shadow: 39 but closer in boxing years to 93 and now, absurdly, also an ex-Freddie Roach fighter.

It is all a big muddle and a bit of a shame. Khan was blessed with grit, heart, talent, electric speed in his youth and a good engine. He did his country proud as an Olympian. But in the pro game he has been given some bum advice, made some strange decisions and has never come under the wing of a promoter-trainer-manager team who could get him to deliver on all that he suggested a decade and more ago.

He speaks now of hitting his peak. Others see a strange twilight. But he has the chance to go out on a high — and despite everything, it would be nice to see him do it.