By Scott Gilfoid: WBC super middleweight champion Carl Froch (26-1, 20 KO’s) suffered his first loss of his career tonight to Mikkel Kessler (43-2, 32 KO’s), losing by a 12 round unanimous decision at the MCH Messecenter Herning, in Herning, Denmark. The final judges’ scores were 115-113, 116-112 and 117-111. I personally scored the fight 117-111 for Kessler, who dominated most of the fight against the painfully slow Froch. I hate to say I told you so, but I predicted that Froch’s lack of hand speed, his wide open defense and his bad habit of keeping his hands hanging down uselessly at his waist would cause him problems in this fight.
And I was totally right about it. Besides his poor technical skills on defense, Froch fought the exact wrong kind of fight to beat a guy like Kessler. Instead of taking the fight to Kessler the entire time, like Froch did against the talented Andre Dirrell in his last fight, Froch fought leaning back, not throwing a lot of punches and treating Kessler like he was a knockout artist. Basically, Froch gave the fight away with that failed strategy.
I figured that Froch was a lost cause in this fight when I heard his trainer Rob McCracken taking about wanting Froch to not brawl with Kessler. That’s crazy. How can Froch not brawl? That’s the one thing that Froch is good at and by telling Froch not to brawl with Kessler, it was like going against Froch’s whole nature.
After the fight, Froch threw in this little tidbit: “I don’t want to make a mockery of anything, but I feel if it was at home in my town [Nottingham], the decision would have gone the other way.” And the sad thing is, Froch is probably right. If this fight had taken place in Nottingham, it probably would have been Froch winning by the scores of 117-111 across the board. I thought Froch easily lost his last fight against Dirrell in Nottingham, yet two of the judges gave Froch the fight.
Kessler fought well in the early part of the fight against, taking advantage of Froch’s low guard by drilling him over and over again to the head. I figured Froch get a clue at some point and try to protect his head, but nope. He kept plodding forward with his hands down by his waist. Froch came on in the 5th round and landed some nice right hands, even dropping Kessler at one point. But the referee correctly ruled it a slip. Froch there, Kessler began to land more and more of his own heavy shots and did a good job of leaning away from Froch’s badly telegraphed right hands.
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