Arthur Abraham needs to consider retirement if he loses to Farias next Saturday

By Boxing News - 01/07/2012 - Comments

Image: Arthur Abraham needs to consider retirement if he loses to Farias next SaturdayBy Dan Ambrose: 31-year-old former IBF middleweight champion Arthur Abraham (32-3, 26 KO’s) has seen much better days in his career than he’s experienced in the last two years. He’s lost three of his last four bouts and looked terrible consistently for the past three years dating all the way back to his fight with Lajuan Simon, who Abraham struggled to beat in March 2009.

Abraham is facing what he hopes is an easy fight next Saturday night against #12 ranked World Boxing Council super middleweight contender Pablo Oscar Natalio Farias (19-1, 11 KO’s) on January 14th at the Baden-Arena, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany. It was pretty clear after losing three of four fights in the Super Six tournament that Abraham, 5’10”, simply isn’t cut out for the super middleweight division.

But instead of moving down immediately in weight now that he’s no longer in the super middleweight tournament, Abraham is taking a lazy approach by getting in yet another super middleweight fight before making a commitment to finally lose the needed weight to get down to the 160lb division. This could turn around and bite Abraham on the backside if Farias, 5’10”, proves to have too much ability if not size for him.

Compared to the guys that Abraham has been getting handled by in the super middleweight division, Farias isn’t considered big. However, he’s a strong guy and he’s clearly super middleweight. Abraham has the power of a super middleweight but he’s got the work rate of a lazy 300 pound out of shape heavyweight. Abraham’s work rate is horrible, absolutely horrible. Even some of the fastest of heavyweights typically are much busier than Abraham.

It’s unclear what the problem is but for the past three years Abraham has been physically unable to fight hard for more than 30 seconds of every round. He seems to save everything for the last seconds of each round to try steal it, and then get a rest break after he exerts himself. It wasn’t hard for the other fighters in the Super Six tournament to figure out what Abraham is doing after watching some of his fights and they were careful to keep clear of him in the last seconds in each round, and this left Abraham running around the ring chasing his opponents with wild shots. He looked awful in losing to Andre Dirrell, Carl Froch and Andre Ward.

If Abraham can’t beat Farias, then he really needs to retire because there are lot better fighters at 160 when Abraham moves down in weight and if he can’t beat a limited fighter like this, then it’s basically over for him unless he wants to be a trial horse for the younger guys to test their skills on.



Comments are closed.