By Allan Fox: IBF/WBA/WBO light heavyweight champion Sergey Kovalev was scouting out former WBA/WBC 168lb champion Andre Ward (29-0, 15 KOs) last Saturday in watching him defeat Sullivan Barrera (17-1, 12 KOs) by a fairly one-sided 12 round unanimous decision at the Oracles Arena in Oakland, California. The fight was televised on HBO Boxing.

Kovalev came away from seeing the Ward-Barrera fight in feeling confident that he’ll be able to hit Ward with his shots when the two of them face each other later this year in November on HBO PPV.

Kovalev feels that Barrera did a better job than he thought he would. Kovalev was expecting Ward to dominate the Cuban and knock him out by the 5th round, but that failed to happen. Ward was never able to hurt Barrera in the fight. Other than a flash knockdown in the 3rd, it was a pretty much strategic and some would say boring fight from Ward.

“I felt that he [Ward] would stop Barrera early. But Barrera did better than I expected,” said Kovalev via Fightnews.com. “What I saw this night? I saw that I can touch him. In the ring will show exactly what will happen.”

Barrera was able to land some nice shots in the fight. He would have been able to land more punches if he had stayed on top of Ward instead of going to the outside. Barrera was having success when he would attack Ward. Where Barrera went wrong is he would constantly back up after attacking Ward briefly.

Instead of staying on top of Ward for three minutes of every round in looking to chop him up, Barrera would throw a small handful of punches and then back away. It was a dumb thing to do because it allowed Ward to continue his boxing from the outside. Kovalev will likely attack Ward and stay on top of him for the full three minutes of every round.

Ward will get beaten up if Kovalev fights like that. Even if Ward is able to limit Kovalev’s punch connect percentage like he did with Barrera, he’ll get beaten up badly with Kovalev only landing 15 to 20 percent of his shots. Barrera landed 15 percent of his punches last Saturday night, and he was still able to badly markup Ward’s face.

If Barrera had fought a smarter fight by staying on top of Ward and just throwing nonstop punches at close to medium range, he would have drained the inactive Ward’s energy down like a battery, and he would have beaten him up. Ward didn’t have the same punching power as Barrera, and there’s no way he could have done well in a war type of fight.

“I’m very happy that he won and it takes me one more step to our possible fight. It’s possible because we have to win one fight more, then after that our fight,” said Kovalev.

Ward will be fighting once more before he faces Kovalev in November, and Kovalev will be fighting once more as well. The two of them will need a big enough name in their next fights to attract interest in their bout later this year in November. This is not a good time for them to go easy by picking a weak opponent for their next fights.