By Allan Fox: 33-year-old former WBA middleweight champion Felix Sturm (37-3-2, 16 KO’s) has a crucial fight on his hands against #1 IBF Sam Soliman (42-11, 17 KO’s) in an IBF middleweight eliminator bout at the ISS Dome in Dusseldorf, Germany.
Sturm needs this fight so that he can get a second crack against IBF middleweight champion Daniel Geale after having been beaten by Geale last year in September in an upset loss in Germany. Sturm, who had previously had the judge’s side with him in a number of controversial fights, found himself finally on the other end of a decision in getting beat by Geale.
It’s very important that the #3 IBF Sturm beat Soliman to get a shot against Geale because he’s probably the only middleweight champion that Sturm has a real chance of beating at this stage in his career. That’s not to say that Sturm can beat Geale, but he’s good enough to possibly edge him in a close decision. But Sturm wouldn’t match up nearly as well against WBO champion Peter Quillin or WBA champ Gennady Golovkin.
Those two fighters not only have good boxing skills, but they also pack quite a wallop with their punches and Sturm couldn’t simply jab his way to a win over them. Sturm would have to get in the trenches and prove that he can beat Golovkin and Quillin in a war, and that’s just not realistic because Sturm isn’t a puncher.
If the Sturm-Soliman fight took place four year or more ago, it would likely be a fairly easy win for Sturm because he was incredibly good at beating slower guys like Soliman, but with the combinations of age and ring wear, Sturm has become a lot vulnerable than he was in the past. There are no longer any easy fights for Sturm now. He takes a lot more shots than he did in that past, and he’s had to go life and death a number of times in the last couple of years to get wins or even draws.
Soliman has the power and the game to give Sturm a lot of problems in this fight. You can forget about Soliman’s 39-years, he’s a lot younger than that in terms of physical age. Soliman has looked really sharp in his last three fights, beating Ermosele Albert, Garth Wood and Giovanni Lorenzo by one-sided decisions. Soliman is coming into this fight with Sturm sitting on a seven-fight winning streak that stretches back to five years to 2008 when he was beaten by a younger Anthony Mundine.