Kessler-Ward: Can Andre pull off the upset?

By Boxing News - 10/19/2009 - Comments

kessler49By Dave Lahr: So far, the fighters that were predicted ahead of time to win have come out victorious in their fights this past weekend. In the case of Carl Froch, he won the fight with a high amount of controversy, but not matter. A win is a win, despite what some boxing fans might think. Few people are giving American Andre Ward much if any chance next month in his fight against Mikkel Kessler at the Oracle Arena, in Oakland, California.

For Ward to win the fight, he’s going to need to take a page out of the playbook used by former World Boxing Organization super middleweight champion Joe Calzaghe when he was able to defeat Kessler by a 12 round unanimous decision in 2007. There’s not much mystery of what Calzaghe did in that fight. He mostly just came at Kessler and overwhelmed him with a massive amount of quick punches, basically outworking Kessler at a relatively close range fight.

What Calzaghe showed is that if you crowd Kessler, hit him with a lot of light shots, he’s not able to get his punches off and isn’t as dangerous. Calzaghe didn’t stay at the ends of Kessler’s punches and instead worked close enough where Kessler didn’t have the same kind of power. Kessler was still able to land a lot of hard shots in the fight, but he seemed to slow way down when faced with a constant flow of incoming shots.

It appears that Kessler doesn’t like to get hit very much and that he can dish it out, but doesn’t like to take it in return. In training for the fight, Calzaghe must have seen how slow and methodical Kessler is with his way of fighting and seen that he could fill in the in between parts with punches to basically prevent Kessler from setting up his offense.

The bad news for Kessler is that Ward is capable of mimicking Calzaghe’s playbook to the tee and throwing as many punches as Calzaghe did in his fight against Kessler. Indeed, Ward may actually be better because he’s capable of putting much more power on his shots compare to the feather fisted Calzaghe. Ward is probably harder puncher than Kessler and as equally powerful as Arthur Abraham when he’s sitting down on his shots.

I doubt that Ward would load up all the time in a fight with Kessler if he’s just trying to gum up Kessler’s offense by throwing lots of punches. But Ward is a consistently harder puncher than a fighter like Calzaghe, who tended to mostly slap with his shots.

Ward with his good power would have a great chance of breaking Kessler down if Ward is able to implement a similar Calzaghe-like strategy against Kessler. Of course, Kessler will in turn be looking to adapt and use movement to keep Ward off of him. But if Ward can follow him around, duck under Kessler’s powerful jabs, he can set up on the inside where Ward can create all kinds of difficulties for Kessler to have to deal with.



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