By Scott Gilfoid: After spending the better part of a year kicking around the idea of facing former WBC middleweight champion Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. (48-2-1, 32 KOs) in a dream fight in Las Vegas, Nevada.
WBA super middleweight champion Carl Froch (33-2, 24 KOs) has seemingly given up on this fight by saying that there would be no point in him beating Chavez Jr. too after the way he was battered and bruised by Andrzej Fonfara recently in his 9th round stoppage defeat.
Froch doesn’t say who he’ll face next other than a possibility of him fighting the winner of the May 23rd fight between James DeGale and Andre Dirrell. If Froch does face the winner of that fight, then we’re probably looking at that fight taking place in late 2015.
That would mean that Froch will have been out of the ring for close to a year and a half by the time he faces the DeGale-Dirrell winner. That’s obviously not a good thing for Froch because he’s already getting up there in age at 37, and he’s not had a true test against a talented super middleweight since his fight against a past his best Mikkel Kessler in 2013.
Froch’s two fights against George Groves can hardly be considered tests due to Groves never having beaten anyone of quality in his career before facing Froch.
“I didn’t see the fight but I saw the left-hook knockdown,” said Froch via RingTV.com. “This is what happens when you step out of your weight division and I’m not surprised that Chavez was overpowered. You can just tell by his frame that he’s not a light heavyweight…He could beat some of the weaker super middleweights out there but world class looks beyond him now. I would prove nothing by beating him so a fight with me is unrealistic.”
A fight between Froch and Chavez Jr. was always unrealistic and without meaning even before Chavez Jr. lost to Fonfara in my view. I’m not sure if Froch had been keeping score in watching Chavez Jr’s career unfold in his recent fights before Froch suddenly got interested in fighting him, but if he had, he would have seen that Chavez Jr. was soundly beaten by Sergio Martinez in 2012, and then he struggled to defeat middleweight journeyman Brian Vera in back to back fights.
Why would Froch have been interested in fighting Chavez Jr. after three horrible fights? Heck, Froch might as well have decided to fight Vera instead of Chavez Jr. because he was about as good as him in their two fights together.
If Froch wants to continue his career, he needs to get back inside the ring and start fighting some guys. He needs a tune-up bout to get him ready to fight the winner of the DeGale-Dirrell fight, because he doesn’t need to be taking the winner of that fight off of a year and a half layoff. I mean, I can see an excuse coming if Froch were to face the winner of that fight and then lose. Instead of acknowledging that he lost to the better guy, I can see Froch making an excuse that he lost because he was rusty.
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