By Scott Gilfoid: WBA super middleweight champion Carl Froch (33-2, 24 KOs dismissed the talk of him potentially facing WBA middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin (32-0, 29 KOs) in the near future. Froch feels that the 5’10 ½” Golovkin is a small fighter, even though he’s only two and a half inches shorter than the 6’1” Froch.
Golovkin would be giving up five inches in each to Froch if they were to face each other. However, we saw Froch get knocked down by the 5’11 ½” George Groves in their first fight in November 2013.
If Groves was able to drop Froch, then you have to assume that Golovkin could do the same thing, perhaps multiple times if he can drag Froch into the ring to face him.
“Golovkin, he’s quite a small kid, isn’t he?” Froch said via IFL TV. “He’s a big punching middleweight. He’s not a super middleweight. [Martin] Murray just took him 11 rounds. No disrespect to Murray, but he wouldn’t last two or three rounds with the Cobra.”
I have a feeling that Froch doesn’t want to fight Golovkin for some reason. I don’t know why, but it just doesn’t look like Froch wants any part of facing Golovkin. Froch is interested in facing former WBC middleweight champion Julio Cesar Chavez Jr, whose rep hasn’t been the same in the United States ever since he was whipped by Sergio Martinez.
I’m not sure if Froch and his promoter Eddie Hearn have been keeping up with the events in the U.S boxing world, but if they were to peruse the record of Chavez Jr, they would see that he was almost blanked by Sergio Martinez three years ago in 2012. They’d also see that Chavez Jr. hasn’t faced a good opponent ever since. He’s fought twice since then against journeyman Brian Vera, and he shockingly was given a controversial 10 round decision in their first fight in September 2013, before beating him in a conclusive manner in 2014.
You can make a strong argument that Chavez Jr has lost two out of his last three fights in the last three years, which is what it makes it all the more strange that Froch wants to fight him. I mean, why fight a guy with two defeats in his last three fights when you have the chance of fighting an undefeated fighter like Golovkin. It doesn’t make sense. It does make sense when you factor in what Froch said via HBO when he said this about fighting Golovkin:
“Just swerve Golovkin like the plague. He punches like a mule. I don’t need to be in with him. Dangerous fight.”
The Golovkin vs. Martin Murray fight, which took place last February, isn’t a very good example for Froch to use for him to judge how well he’d do against Golovkin. First of all, Murray was running and holding the entire fight. Yeah, Murray lasted 11 rounds, but he wasn’t exactly fighting aggressively. It looked to me that Murray was purely in the survival mode after tasting Golovkin’s power in the 1st round.
Murray took some huge shots in the 1st round, and he then got on his bike and started running like mad around the ring. Each time Golovkin would catch up to Murray, he was grabbed by the British fighter in a tight clinch. It wasn’t until Golokvin started backing up to avoid the clinches that the fight really started to get way out of hand. In looking at the Golovkin-Murray fight, it appeared to me that Golovkin carried Murray for the first 9 rounds before starting to put heat on him in the 10th and 11th rounds. If you saw that fight you’ll have noticed that Golovkin started putting a lot more pressure on Murray starting in the 10th round, and he began to throw his shots with much more power than he had in the earlier rounds.
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