By Scott Gilfoid: Kalle Sauerland, the promoter for WBO super middleweight champion Arthur Abraham (40-4, 28 KO’s), says that his proposed optional title defense against #6 WBO, #10 WBA Paul Smith (35-3, 20 KO’s) isn’t a done deal yet for September 27th. No agreement has been reached yet. The fight is/was supposed to take place in Berlin, Germany.
Kalle said on his twitter “Just to confirm Abraham v Smith is not done. It is a fight we are interested in doing but we have not reached an agreement as of yet.”
Now you can take this any way you want it. This could mean that they’re still working on the deal, and looking for Smith to come in at a lower price in order to make it a worthwhile fight to make. But it’s also no secret that Sauerland would like to match the recently signed George Groves up against Abraham in a nice little in house fight.
With a match-up like that it would be sure to bring a good payday for Abraham and bring could money to Sauerland due to the possibility of the fight being staged in the UK in front of a big crowd. There’s also the option of making the fight pay-per-view. I frankly wouldn’t be surprised if Smith gets dumped for Groves if Smith’s asking price is too high, because it’s not great fight in terms of attracting interest, and there are arguably far more deserving guys out there than Smith, who hasn’t beaten a decent fighter since his win over Tony Quigley in 2009, and even he wasn’t a great fighter.
The main thing that Smith is good for is setting up a bigger fight between Abraham and Groves. The Smith-Abraham fight sets the table for the bigger fight between Abraham and Groves. The only issue is whether the WBO will allow Groves to fight for a title right away after his two knockout losses to IBF/WBA super middleweight champion Carl Froch.
It doesn’t make sense for the WBO to approve Groves as an opponent for Abraham unless he’s shown that he’s fully back from his recent KO loss by picking up a win over a good opponent or two first. But that’s in a perfect world. Realistically, the WBO will likely say yes to an Abraham-Groves fight even without Groves getting back in the ring to show that he’s still cogent first.
As old as Abraham is it might be a risk even to put him in with Paul Smith at this point. He looked shaky in his last two fights against Nikola Sjekloca and Robert Stieglitz. Abraham also appeared to lose to Willbeforce Shihepo last year in August in a fight where Abraham was given a 12 round decision in Germany. I saw the same fight and had Shihepo easily winning the fight 8 rounds to 4, and 2 of the rounds I gave Abraham in that fight were mercy rounds. It was more of a 10 round to 2 score for Shihepo. Abraham looked slow, easy to hit, and too short to do much in that fight.
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