By Scott Gilfoid: Former IBF middleweight champion Arthur Abraham (32-2, 26 KO’s) comes into the May 14th Super Six tournament semifinal bout against unbeaten WBA Super World super middleweight champion Andre Ward (23-0, 12 KO’s) licking his wounds and hurt feelings from his last two Super Six tournament fights against Andre Dirrell and Carl Froch. Abraham, 31, lost both of those fights and looked over-matched and terrible in each. Now, he’s about to face what many boxing fans feel is the best remaining fighter in the tournament in the 27-year-old Ward.

In short, Abraham has almost no chance of winning this fight. Ward is younger, faster, bigger at 6’1″ compared to Abraham’s 5’10” and much better defensively than Abraham. Ward has a better work rate and much better accuracy with his shots. The only thing that Abraham has going for him is a slight edge in experience and better power. To be sure, Abraham is the harder puncher of the two and has a big edge in this area. But that’s not going to be enough for him if he can’t land his punches with any regularity.

At 31, Abraham is no longer seemingly capable of throwing enough punches to beat the better fighters that can get out of the way of his big shots. As long as Ward can block or dodge Abraham’s home run shots, Ward wins this fight. Abraham isn’t helped by his lack of hand speed and his tendency to telegraph his punches. It’s easy to tell when Abraham is getting ready to throw his shots because he often runs forward while throwing shots from his waist. You can literally see Abraham’s punches coming from a mile away.

Even Froch, who isn’t exactly the quickest fighter in the world, was able to see Abraham’s shots coming and was able to get out of the way of most of them. Ward will make it look like child’s play in blocking or making Abraham miss with his shots. The good thing that will come out of this fight is that Abraham will get a clue that he doesn’t have the size to compete against the bigger super middleweights and will do whatever he has to do to take the needed weight off to go back down to middleweight where he might be able to quickly capture one of the middleweight paper titles and resume defending his title against mostly European opposition like before.