By Scott Gilfoid: If there’s anything that Carl Froch (28-1, 20 KO’s) is sure about in putting his WBC super middleweight title on the line against WBA champion Andre Ward, it’s that he feels strongly that he won’t be getting knocked out tonight.

It’s kind of an odd thing to even talk about because it reminds one of the movie Raging Bull where Jake Lamotta says “You couldn’t knock me out, Ray.” Yet Lamotta still lost. Froch says “He [Ward] can’t knock me out. Potentially, he’s getting knocked out.”

If Froch has seen any of Ward’s fights he’ll have learned enough to realize that Ward doesn’t need to knock you out in order to beat you. He simply outboxes his opponents for the most part, and makes them look really bad in losing. That’s enough, isn’t it? Froch may not get knocked out but he can also look just as bad by taking a real pounding from Ward. Depending on how bad it gets for Froch, he may actually wish he was knocked out in order to stop the beating.

I recently re-watched the Froch vs. Andre Dirrell fight last night, and I got say Dirrell was making Froch look like a clumsy oaf for much of the fight. Froch started fouling when it got really bad for him and it looked as if he was doing out of embarrassment because of how badly he was getting beaten rather than an actual game plan.

In watching the fight I thought Froch was trying to take the easy way out by being disqualified, but the referee just let him get away with the fouling and it turned out to be a fight resembling some kind of mixed martial arts fight rather than boxing. Ward is quite capable of making Froch look just as bad as Dirrell did, if not worse. And since this fight isn’t taking place in Froch’s home city of Nottingham, England, where his fight with Dirrell took place, I can see Froch losing a lot of points if he turns to fouling if things get really bad for him.