Will Abraham try to manhandle Dirrell?

By Scott Gilfoid: Arthur Abraham (31-0, 25 KO’s) has none of the qualities that makes Andre Dirrell (18-1, 13 KO’s) so great a fighter. Abraham is a slow, crude slugger that tends to try and overpower his opponents with a combination of rough stuff and sledge hammer blows. Abraham, perhaps because of his stocky build and slow reflexes, is very economical with his punches to the point where he rarely fights hard for more than 20 to 30 seconds of every three minute round.

The majority of the time, Abraham bides his time, conserves his energy and covers up his head and vulnerable midsection with his high crab-like guard. He doesn’t seems to fight hard for more than a couple of brief flurries in every round, and has been able to get away with fighting like this because most of his rather average opponents have folded when hit by him.

Of the ones that have lasted the distance with him, Abraham has won despite throwing few punches. Of his 31 fights, I’ve seen two of them – Lujuan Simon and Edison Miranda (the first fight between them) – that I felt that Abraham should have lost by a 12 round decision.

Dirrell is a fighter that constantly works hard in the ring, throws a lot of punches, has blinding god given hand speed and has big power in both hands. Dirrell doesn’t try to conserve energy by holding off on his punches to save energy, because he has energy to burn. And, unlike Abraham and WBC super middleweight champion Carl Froch, Dirrell doesn’t fight in front of his home audience in the United States.

If you look at Dirrell’s resume, very few of his 18 fights have taken place in his home state of Michigan. What that means is that Dirrell hasn’t become used to fighting in front of home town crowds like Abraham and Froch. The USA is so big that unless a fighter is fighting in his home city, they often don’t have a hometown advantage, even though some people from foreign countries might think that the American fighter has home town advantage because they’re fighting in the U.S. and not overseas.

Believe me, if an American fighter isn’t fighting in their actual home city, they might as well be fighting out of the country, because their fan base is much lower when not fighting at home unless they’re incredibly popular fighters like Floyd Mayweather Jr. Dirrell is a popular fighter, but he’s not on the level of a Mayweather yet. He may be in the future, but not right now.

Dirrell, however, has fought remarkably well given the circumstances of having to fight in states and cities where boxing fans have little idea who he is. In contrast, Abraham has fought almost every fight of his career in the small country of Germany, where he’s well known all over the country by boxing fans.

As far as the fight goes, I think Abraham is going to try to rough Dirrell up to try and get an advantage. Abraham often does this in his fights, but after watching the Dirrell-Froch fight where Carl was able to get Dirrell off his game when he started roughing him up in the 2nd half of the fight.

Although I thought Froch should have been fouled out and disqualified for the high number of fouls that I saw him use against Dirrell, I can see how Abraham might have studied this fight and could use what he learned in his fight with Dirrell on March 27th. The good thing is that the fight will be held in the Joe Louis Arena, in Detroit, Michigan, which is a little over an hour away by car from Dirrell’s home city of Flint, Michigan.

So if Abraham starts with the fouling and other rough stuff, I expect the referee to give warnings this time and start to penalize shortly thereafter for any rough fouls that Abraham might use in the fight. We can’t have the Super Six tournament reduced to an MMA style fight for brawlers that are too slow to catch up to the speedy Dirrell and land.

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