By Allan Fox: WBA Super World middleweight champion Felix Sturm (37-2-2, 16 KO’s) has bought a little breathing room from his mandatory challenger WBA World middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin by choosing to fight a unification bout against IBF middleweight champion Daniel Geale (27-1, 15 KO’s) on September 1st at the Koenig Pilsener Arena, Oberhausen, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany.

Although Geale hardly is an easy fight, he’s at least someone who isn’t a threat to KO Sturm with a single shot like Golovkin is.

Perhaps for this reason we’re seeing the 33-year-old Sturm in with Geale rather than fight where he could get seriously hurt and lose his WBA title against Golovkin. After all these years, Sturm is finally starting to show weaknesses, as he had a couple of close calls recently in fights against Matthew Macklin and Martin Murray. Sturm beat Macklin by a controversial 12 round decision and then fought to a draw aith Muray.

The fights seemed to show clearly that Sturm is starting to lose his skills, because this kind of thing would never have happened in the past. Sturm has always been a rock solid champion who rarely was tested. Granted, Sturm has faced pretty much nothing but weak opposition in all the years that he’s been the WBA champ because of how weak the fighters were that were ranked in the top 15. But in looking at him taking big head shots in fights against Macklin, Murray and Ronald Hearns, it seems to have shown that Sturm is slipping.

The 31-year-old Geale really hasn’t been tested either. After beating IBF champ Sebastian Sylvester last year to pick up the middleweight title, Geale has had two easy title defenses against Eromosele Albert and Osumanu Adama. You’d like to have seen Geale face a better opponent than this to show that he’s for real. However, what Geale is doing is pretty much the norm for the entire sport. Once a fighter picks up a belt, they’ll either start milking it immediately or they’ll start the milking of the title after two or three fights.

You got to hand it to Geale for stepping up and facing Sturm for the title, because it’s not going to be an easy fight. However, it won’t mean anything unless Geale can figure out how to get the better of Sturm in close. He won’t be able to outbox Sturm because he’s a master fighter. You’ve got to hurt Sturm if you want to beat him.