Froch thinks Joshua can become world champion

By Boxing News - 12/29/2015 - Comments

joshua1234By Scott Gilfoid: After seeing British/Commonwealth heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua (15-0, 15 KOs) temporarily wobbled by Dillian Whyte (16-1, 13 KOs) earlier this month on December 12, Sky Sports analyst Carl Froch now thinks that Joshua can become a world champion.

Why does Froch believe this? That’s a good question. Froch believes that because Joshua was able to survive being hurt by Whyte, it means Joshua can become a world champion. Froch doesn’t say anything about Whyte having come into the fight with an injury to his left shoulder, which he reinjured in the process of hurting Joshua with a left hook in the 2nd round.

Froch doesn’t say anything about how Whyte wasn’t able to really use his left hand after injuring his left shoulder. This would obviously be something that I would factor into my analysis of a fighter, especially if I were to try and extrapolate from one of his wins and predict what they could do in the future. Joshua + an injured Whyte = unknown future for Joshua. Froch’s formula appears to be the opposite. Joshua + an injured Whyte = Joshua a future world champion. That’s kind of a wrong-headed way of seeing things in my book. Basically we learned nothing from Joshua’s fight against Whyte other than the fact that Joshua can be hurt when he bum rushes his opponents, and that he’s got stamina issues.

“What I learned from that was firstly he’s human and secondly that he can take a punch. He can adapt and showed that he can recover,” Froch said to skysports.com. “He’s showed me there he’s got the ingredients you need to become a world champion,” said Froch.

I disagree with Froch. We didn’t learn that Joshua can take a punch, because he was out on his feet from a left hook by Whyte. That same punch reinjured Whyte’s left shoulder. As a result, he couldn’t throw hard shots with his left shoulder afterwards. Now picture in your mind what would have happened if Whyte had been able to keep using his left hand with huge power.

Do you honestly think that Joshua would have been able to handle getting hit with the same left hand another 100 times to the head? I think not. That’s what we would have been looking at if Whyte hadn’t hurt his left shoulder. As such, my conclusion is that we did not see that Joshua can become a world champion from the Whyte fight, because he only had a healthy Whyte for exactly a 1 ½ rounds. The remainder of the fight, Whyte was injured and fighting with just one wing working for him.
“That solidified my opinion that he will be a world champion one day,” Froch said.

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Oh boy, a Froch sound like he’s drank the Joshua kool-aid, and is convinced that he’s going to be the guy based off of a win over an injured fighter. I think someone needs to sit Froch down, give him a strong cup of coffee and explain to him that Whyte injured his left shoulder in the 2nd round of the Joshua fight.

Froch needs to know that Whyte recently had surgery to repair his injured left shoulder. If Froch still believes that Joshua will be a world champion despite the fact that Whyte fought with an injured left shoulder, then I have to ignore anything that Froch says about Joshua as a fighter because he’s not making adjustments in his reasoning. You have to be able to make adjustments in your original conclusions when they’re based on faulty, incomplete evidence.



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