By Scott Gilfoid: WBA super middleweight champion Andre Ward (23-0, 13 KO’s) will be fully prepared and ready for anything Arthur Abraham (31-2, 25 KO’s) brings to the table in their semifinals Super Six tournament fight for either April or May. Ward, 26, knows that Abraham will be desperate and ready to do anything he can to try and reverse his two fight losing streak. Abraham has supposedly fixed the problems with his game and will come out looking better for this fight like the old Abraham.

I doubt Abraham will be capable of doing anything different from what he’s been doing in the past. Abraham has been suffering from a low punch rate for the past few years dating back to 2008, and seems to be more of an age related problem rather than something that has to do with conditioning or bad strategy. Abraham just can’t seem to fight hard for more than 20 seconds of every round without gassing out and going into shutdown.

This is why Abraham only fights hard at the ends of each round. He knows he can’t do this at the beginning of the middle portions of the rounds because he’ll tire out and take punishment. Ward is going to tee off on Abraham and turn the fight into a bag session. Ward is going to force Abraham to fight or end up getting knocked out. This is going to be fun to watch for me, because Abraham has been a knockout waiting to happen for ages.

It’s just that the middleweight division was so poor while he was the IBF champion, and when he fought his first fight in the Super Six, he was luckily to have been matched against the stamina plagued Jermain Taylor rather than fighters with better conditioning. When Abraham was finally put in with a top fighter in the talented Dirrell in March last year, Dirrell badly schooled Abraham. You can expect Ward to take a page from Dirrell’s playbook and do the exact same thing with Abraham, and send him packing to Germany.