By Scott Gilfoid: Showtime’s six-man tourney starts in October and will consist of Carl Froch, Jermain Taylor, Arthur Abraham, Mikkel Kessler, Andre Ward and Andre Dirrell who participate in a series of bouts that will string out through 2010 until June when a winner is eventually decided. Of the fighters participating, most of them have superb hand speed, and boxing ability.
However, Froch, the World Boxing Council super middleweight champion, stands out as perhaps the slowest, and most beatable of the bunch. Although Froch beat Taylor by a 12th round knockout in April 2009, just barely pulling it together to get the knockout in the last seconds of the fight.
Had it not been for the knockout, Froch would have lost the fight. I don’t see that happening again, because Taylor, a superb boxer/puncher, won’t make the mistake of trying to slug it out with Froch again like last time. This leaves Froch in a bad position, because he doesn’t match up well with the speedier, better skilled fighters in the tourney like Dirrell, Ward and especially Kessler.
Those fights look like one-sided mismatches with Froch taking a beating. The tourney has been said to be being finalized. The tourney will be a big chance for Froch to show his skills to American audiences. But it also there’s a good chance that the American audiences will see Froch fall on his face, because he’s facing highly skilled fighters with speed and power above his own.
Froch may not be happy with having been skipped over all these years by Joe Calzaghe, but by taking part in this tourney, Froch might be the weak link in the chain. That’s nothing for Froch to be ashamed of, because it least he was thought well enough to be one of the six fighters invited to the tourney. That says something about where he stands. He’s at least one of the six or seven best fighters in the super middleweight division. The problem here is that I see Froch as being the bottom feeder in the bunch.
That’s still nothing to be ashamed of, because of Calzaghe was participating in the tourney, my guess is that Calzaghe would be beaten by most of these fighters with the possible exception of Kessler and Froch. It doesn’t matter if Froch losses badly against all the fighters. He still will be a household name by the end of the tourney, well known to many boxing fans and that’s not half bad, is it?
Froch has a chance to make history should he beat all these guys and come out the winner of the tourney. I can’t see it happening, but if Froch somehow does get by all these guys, he will have done more in his career than most super middleweights have accomplished, even Calzaghe himself.
The winner of this tourney will be considered the top guy in the division and will likely be able to command big paydays. I just can’t see that being Froch, because of his lack of speed and boxing ability.
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