By Dave Lahr: WBA super middleweight champion Mikkel Kessler is going to have to be at the top of his game if he plans on beating unbeaten super middleweight contender Andre Ward (20-0, 13 KO’s) next month on November 21st in their Super Six tournament fight at the Oracle Arena, in Oakland, California. Kessler looked rusty, slow and off the mark against his last opponent Gusmyr Perdomo in September. Kessler, 30, can be partially excused for looking less than stellar because he had been out of action for almost a year due to managerial problems.

However, you can go back even further than that in see that Kessler didn’t look especially impressive in fights against Danilo Haussler, Joe Calzaghe and Dimitri Sartison in the past two years. It might be impressive for some people, but not for Kessler and not when facing a talented fighter like the unbeaten Ward. It will take a much better performance from Kessler to beat Ward. Let’s look at several different areas and take them apart.

Defensively: Kessler is not on the same level as Ward is in the defensive side of the game. Kessler does have great defensive skills and is excellent at blocking shots. However, he’s been slow to react in his past two fights to incoming shots. At first I thought he was having problems picking up right hands that were thrown his way, because Sartison was able to nail Kessler with a high number of clean right hands. But, Perdomo showed that he could hit Kessler with not only rights but a lot of straight left hands without his shots being defended by Kessler.

This tells me that Kessler might be losing his ability to see incoming shots and react to them in time so that he can block them. On the other side of the aisle, Ward is extraordinary at picking off punches. With his cat-like reflexes, he’s very hard to hit cleanly with shots. Ward can be hit, but usually only when he’s taking chances and even then only by one shot at a time. You can hit him once, but you’re not going to get another chance to hit him again for awhile because of his defensive skills.

Advantage – Ward

Offensively: This is another area where Ward is the more talented fighter. Kessler is like a baseball pitcher with only three kinds of pitches – jab, right hand, and left hook. There’s not much variety with Kessler, but then again he’s so good with these three punches that he’s able to dominate most of his competition without needing a more varied offense.

Ward, however, is a fighter that likes to throw punches at every angle and is good at getting the better of opponents with his counter punching ability during exchanges. It doesn’t matter what position Ward is in, he’s always able to throw a punch and score with his shots. At the same time, Ward has the better hand speed of the two. At 25, Ward is still young and hasn’t begun to show signs of slowing down like Kessler.

Advantage – Ward