By Scott Gilfoid: IBF super middleweight champion Carl Froch (30-2, 22 KO’s) may have no interest in fighting unbeaten super middleweight contender George Groves, but that doesn’t mean that Groves can’t still get to Froch in another way. Groves plans on helping WBA super middleweight champion Mikkel Kessler (46-2, 35 KO’s) get ready for his May 25th rematch against Froch by helping him with sparring to mimic how Froch fights.
Groves will be traveling to Copenhagen this Thursday to start helping Kessler.
Kessler’s trainer Jimmy Montoya said to the dailymail.co.uk “We hope to have him [Groves] here for sparring with us. We want George here because it would be really good quality sparring. We have invited him for April 28th. “
I can see Groves doing a good job of aping Froch by going all out with his slugging style of fighting. That’s one thing that Groves seems to be good at. He tends to jump on his opponents and just let look in the exact same way that Froch does. It’s not something that will work against a quality fighter like Andre Ward or the Dirrell brothers, but against some of the contenders it definitely works.
Groves might not be that great with being able to shift into the more defensive pattern than Froch shows after he gets hit. Froch talks a big game but in some of his fights, like his previous one against Kessler, he backed off each time he tasted leather and would fluctuate with slugging and boxing. Groves is more of an all-out type of fighter.
When Groves isn’t doing that he’s moving around on the outside using endless feints in what appears to be an imitation of how David Haye fights. That won’t help Kessler at all because Froch doesn’t fight that way. He throws jabs from the outside and will try to use his reach if he can, but if it’s not working he’ll go after Kessler.
I suspect it won’t work and Froch will be forced to slug it out with Kessler whether he likes it or not. Froch will literally have no other choice but to go all out because his jab isn’t as good as Kessler’s and he’ll just get boxed silly from the outside.
I think it’s possible that Groves could help Kessler as long as he does a good job of following the instructions from Montoya copying Froch’s style. It’ll be worthless for Kessler if Groves starts running around the ring like David Haye using his God awful feints 24/7. At that point I would expect Montoya to tell Groves to get lost because he’s not helping and is just wasting their time.
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