By Scott Gilfoid: The upcoming October 17th Super Six bout between World Boxing Council super middleweight champion Carl Froch and challenger Andre Dirrell reminds me in a lot of ways of the first fight between Muhammad Ali, then known as Cassius Clay, and Sonny Liston. At the time the fight took place, Clay wasn’t given much chance by boxing establishment because they saw him as too young, inexperienced and not tough enough to last against the powerful Liston.

They recognized Clay as having fast hands and excellent boxing skills, but they still thought that Liston would be too powerful for him and would knock him out. As it turned out, the boxing experts were wrong. It was Clay’s fast hands and youth that prevailed in the end as Clay ended up stopping Liston. For this October17th fight in Nottingham, you can insert Dirrell for Clay and put the slow moving Froch as Liston.

Yes, I realize that Froch’s power doesn’t put him anywhere close to being as powerful as the heavyweight Liston, but Froch is considered by some people to be the biggest puncher in the Super Six tournament. I don’t believe it myself. I see Dirrell as being the biggest puncher in the tourney, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume that Froch is the biggest puncher in the Super Six.

Now people are saying that Froch will be able to overwhelm Dirrell with his power, that he’ll take him out by the 6th round and that he’ll have too much experience for Dirrell to be able to handle. I say look at the young Ali. Before he had fought Liston, Ali hadn’t fought anyone of note.

Most of his fights were against unknown fighters with mediocre talent and power. What boxing experts made a mistake about when judging Ali’s ability is that they did it by looking at what he had done in the past against his soft opponents. In other words, they predicted the outcome of the Liston-Clay fight on the fact that Clay had little experience against top talent and that he hadn’t ever had to fight a long, grueling fight before.

This obviously was a wrong way of looking at the fight, because when you’re dealing with a young fighter with speed and talent like Clay – and Andre Dirrell – they are in essence creating their experience with each fight. Talented fighters don’t necessarily have to face long list of other talented fighters in order to become great fighters themselves.

They are going to be good anyway, even if they’re facing lesser fighters. Certainly it helps when they have experience going into a fight, but it’s not needed for a talented young fighter for them to succeed. They succeed on talent alone.

So what we have here is an aging 32-year-old Froch, a fighter without much hand speed, foot speed or defensive ability to speak of facing a fighter in Dirrell who is incredibly fast with hands and feet. Additionally, Dirrell is bigger than Froch, a southpaw and is hard to hit.

We have all the elements here for another Ali vs. Liston fight on October 17th. And like Liston, Dirrell will be entering a lion’s den and considered the underdog. Dirrell is going to make history on this night by boxing circles around the slower, maybe powerful Froch, and make him look as limited as Clay made Liston look years ago.