By Scott Gilfoid: We’ve seen what happens when a fighter gets a little too over anxious and starts fouling this past weekend when Arthur Abraham was disqualified in the 11th round for striking Andre Dirrell after he had slipped on the canvas. On April 24th, World Boxing Council super middleweight champion Carl Froch (26-0, 20 KO’s) will be putting his unbeaten record on the line against former WBA/WBC super middleweight champion Mikkel Kessler (42-2, 32 KO’s) in Herning, Denmark.

The question we have to ask here is whether Froch, a fighter who is no stranger to fouling, will be able to keep it clean enough to avoid getting penalized over and over or disqualified. Froch is coming off his own foul-plagued fight with Dirrell in October of last year, a fight in which Froch in some ways made Abraham look like a choir boy in comparison. Froch fought the first four rounds cleanly without one foul I could see.

However, when things began to get out of hand as Dirrell was dominating Froch in the first rounds, Froch turned into Mr. Hyde in the 5th round and body slammed Dirrell during the round. The rest of the fight saw Froch using an assortment of fouls, such as rabbit punches, holding and hitting and pushing down on Dirrell’s head. Oddly enough, all of this was ignored by the referee and the one who ended up being penalized was Dirrell.

It’s never easy to fight in another opponents home city, but Dirrell really had things stacked against him in fighting Froch in Nottingham. We have to hope that Froch got all his fouling out of his system in that fight, because if Froch fights like that against Kessler, I doubt that those things will fly in Denmark. I can see Froch getting penalized until he starts keeping it clean.

Hopefully, Froch doesn’t go into the Kessler fight thinking he can rough the guy up to get an edge. If things go badly for Froch, which could very well happen because of the incredible talent of Kessler, I’d hate to see Froch fouling left and right out of frustration. We just got a good learning tool in watching Abraham go spastic against Dirrell and getting disqualified.

We don’t need to get another example of that with Froch being disqualified for body slamming, holding and hitting or throwing rabbit punches. If he’s not good enough to beat Kessler fighting cleanly, then so be it. Froch will just have to lose the fight. That’ the way things go. I already think Froch should have lost the fight with Dirrell. Froch won it, but he needs to better against Kessler because I think he’s going to get spanked if he looks like he did against Dirrell.