By Scott Gilfoid: Former world champion Carl Froch expects #10 WBO Martin Murray (32-2-1, 15 KOs) to have a really difficult time trying to beat WBO super middleweight champion Arthur Abraham (43-4, 29 KOs) in their fight this Saturday night at the TUI Arena in Hannover, Germany.
Froch believes that it’s a winnable fight for the 33-year-old Murray, but still a hard one potentially due to Abraham’s punching power. Froch thinks that Murray needs to outwork the 35-year-old Abraham to have a chance of winning the fight. In other words, Murray needs to try and do what Paul Smith attempted in his first fight by Abraham by being the busier fighter, and then hoping that the judges will ignore Abraham’s much more powerful shots in order to win a decision.
I think it’s going to be hard for Murray to follow Froch’s game plan, because he doesn’t usually throw a lot of punches, and he has a bad habit of hiding behind his clam-shell defense like a good sparring partner rather than a true contender. Murray does just enough to lose his fights by failing to fight hard, and either running or putting up the old clamshell defense.
“This is a hard, hard fight for Martin Murray, but it’s not mission impossible,” Froch said to skysports.com. “I still think the champion [Abraham] will stay a champion, but I’m not going to write Murray off. He has to increase that work rate more than usual.”
Murray doesn’t like to get hit. That’s the problem. Once he gets nailed, he takes off and starts running like mad. He also does a lot of holding as well. If you look at why Murray lost to Sergio Martinez a couple of years ago it was because he didn’t throw enough punches. He was just hiding behind his guard all night long.
It was the same thing in his draw against Felix Sturm. Murray preferred to hide behind his clamshell guard rather than throw punches. In Murray’s recent knockout loss to WBA middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin earlier this year, Murray was holding and running for the entire fight until he was stopped in the 11th round. It was a really poor performance from a challenger, because Murray fought like someone who was just trying to survive rather than to win the fight.
Talking about his victory over Abraham in the Super Six tournament in 2010, Froch said “I was able to use my range and box him [Abraham], but he’s [Murray] not physiologically designed to do what I did.”
Murray doesn’t have long arms, so he can’t fight Abraham from the outside. If Murray tries to stay on the outside, then we’ll see Abraham rush him and brain him with big shots over and over again. Abraham will easily steal the rounds and win by a one-sided decision.
Comments are closed.