YOU'RE already a legend Ricky - now have two big-money fights and retire!

That was the message from British boxing great Henry Cooper in Manchester last night and still throwing the verbal equivalents of Enery's `Ammer.

Hatton has led a British boxing revival, winning the IBF light-welterweight title from the great Kostya Tszyu on a memorable night in Manchester last summer, and going on to add the WBA light-welter and welterweight belts.

But the restless Hitman wants to see his name in lights on the Strip in Las Vegas, and to clean up the best that the ten-stone division has to offer - including a head-on collision with Floyd Mayweather, touted by many as the world's best pound-for-pound boxer.

But Cooper feels he should limit his ambitions, saying: "If I had anything to do with Ricky, I would tell him to have two more fights and call it a day, but I hear he is planning five or six, as he wants to fight all the top guys in the world.

"But you only have to look at Ricky's face to realise he is not a ballroom dancer. When you fight like he does, prepared to take two punches in order to land your one, you only have so many fights in you.

"That is why I feel he should go for two more, at the most, make a couple of million quid from each and then enjoy the rest of his life.

"If he goes on to try to fight all the guys out there, sooner or later he will get beaten, and possibly even hurt. He will already go down in history for what he has achieved, winning world titles and beating Tszyu.

"You only have to look at Barry McGuigan, who was a similar fighter to Ricky, and in his last two or three fights he was talking punches and going down momentarily, things that hadn't happened to him before.

"What people don't realise is that every time a guy makes the weight for a fight, he leaves something behind, something he can never get back."

Cooper was in Manchester as special guest of the re-launched Anglo-American Sporting Club, now holding six dinner shows a year at the Midland Hotel.

And he also believes it is time to take the kid gloves off Amir Khan, who will have his ninth professional fight at Bolton Arena in September 2 after dispatching Colin Bain with ease at the weekend.

"They are just giving Amir dead bodies at the moment, and I think he has had enough easy fights," said Cooper.

"I know he has to learn, but you learn nothing from fights where you knock a mug out in a round or two.

"They have to put him in with slightly better fighters, like they did the time before last with the Hungarian kid Laszlo Komjathi.

"He needs more of those and he now needs to move up to eight rounds." Tweet