Groves seemed to have the same habit as Amir Khan of just throwing punches blindly in flurries that did little other than hit gloves and leave Groves wide open for counter shots. Groves doesn’t have a lot of power and it looked like he was hoping that the referee would just step in and halt the fight with Johnson still standing on his feet.
Groves fought like he had no sense because that’s not how you fight a top fighter, even an old top fighter like Johnson. You don’t just bum rush him and try to take him out like the 2nd tier guys that Groves has built his impressive resume on.
I was really hoping that Groves would look good in this fight because I thought he might make for a decent interim world champion one of these days but this performance has be me thinking that the best we’ll see from Groves is domestic honors or perhaps an EBU title holder once James DeGale gets tired of holding the strap.
Groves fights just like Amir Khan does with his wild flurries where he wastes tons of energy while accomplishing jack. Just such a poor way of fighting, and I was hoping his trainer Adam Booth would give him some wisdom in the corner in between rounds, but Booth looked lost. Where was the method to this wild fighting strategy? It just looked like Groves had no game plan whatsoever and was just making it on the fly instead of having a good concrete strategy in how to beat the old wily veteran Johnson.
What’s really sad is this fight was probably a dress rehearsal for how Groves is going to fight WBO super middleweight champion Arthur Abraham when he challenges him for his World Boxing Organization strap next year. I can just see Groves bum rushing Abraham and trying to take him out with flurries each round, and then getting poleaxed by a big hand from Abraham just like Manny Pacquiao was against Juan Manuel Marquez.
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