How can Abraham beat Dirrell without hand speed?

By Scott Gilfoid: Former International Boxing Federation middleweight champion Arthur Abraham (31-0, 25 KO’s) goes into his March 27th fight against American Andre Dirrell (18-1, 13 KO’s) with three strikes against him. First of all, Abraham is a lot shorter than the 6’2” at only 5’10”. Abraham’s reach is also three inches shorter than Dirrell at 72” compared to Dirrell’s 75”. Abraham will have problems with that alone, because he won’t be able to get near Dirrell without taking a severe storm of lightning fast punches to the head before he even gets in position where he can throw a punch.

Secondly, Abraham is an older fighter at 30-years-old, four years older than the young Dirrell. You can’t overlook that statistic because Dirrell still has all of his blinding hand speed, whereas Abraham, who was never fast to begin with during his early portion of his career, appears to have slowed down in the past couple of years a couple of notches.

Age is a killer for boxing perhaps more than any other sport except for track and field athletes. Speed is another factor that Dirrell has going for him in this fight. Dirrell is probably the fastest fighter in the super middleweight division with hand speed reminding one of a young Roy Jones Jr.

There’s a huge difference between Dirrell’s speed and the slow lumbering shots thrown by Abraham. It’s like night and day. Dirrell is like a blur when he throws punches, and it’s often to track his shots unless you have the chance of playing his fights in slow motion. In contrast, Abraham is very slow, about as slow as Carl Froch. There’s not a lot of fast twitch nerve fiber in Abraham’s arms and shoulders.

He’s all about trying to overpower an opponent with brute force, but without the hand speed to accompany his strength. Dirrell is the much smoother fighter, who moves skillfully around the ring like a well tuned piece of machinery. Abraham is more like an old V8 badly in need of a tune-up and not firing on all cylinders. He can get the job done when facing good fighters at super middleweight, but against the Ferrari-like Dirrell, Abraham is going to be over-matched at the starting line.

It’s going to be almost embarrassing for the thirty-year-old Abraham when the fight gets started, because Dirrell’s superior abilities will be painfully obvious. Dirrell is the better technician and has superior ring generalship compared to Abraham. With Abraham, he’s all about covering up for half the fight like a copy of Joshua Clottey, and then coming out in the second half of the fight to fight hard for 10 to 20 seconds of every round.

Abraham usually only fights hard at the very end of the round so he can get an immediate breather. It’s so predictable that it’s not even funny. If you watch any of Abraham’s fights in the past three years, he fights the same way every time. He covers up mostly for the first four to six rounds, and then opens up with the fireworks in the second half of the fight.

And he always fights hard in the last 10 to 20 seconds, and does zero in the first two and half minutes of every round. If I was Dirrell’s trainer, I would go over this with him and make sure he’s aware of Abraham’s tendencies.

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