By Scott Gilfoid: The stage 2 Super Six bout between Arthur Abraham and Andre Dirrell may well be the best fight that boxing fans will get to see during the entire Super Six tournament.

It matches two contrasting styles that are hard to ignore. On one side you have Abraham, a slow moving, slow punching slugger who tends to do very little punching for the first five to six rounds of every fight as he likes to conserve energy.

On the other side, you have the blazing fast Dirrell, a fighter with extraordinary hand speed and athletic ability and with defensive skills that are second to none in the super middleweight tournament. Dirrell is the younger fighter at 26, still improving day by day. It’s hard to say how good Dirrell will be in the future because he’s making huge leaps and bounds with his ability, and is like a diamond in the rough.

With Abraham, he peaked in ability long ago while the IBF middleweight champion, and appears to be on the downward trajectory for his career. Although Abraham is still winning, his work rate and stamina have taken a big drop in the past three years. Abraham used to be a hard worker in his fights, and it wasn’t unnatural for him take the lead and outwork his opponents.

Now, however, Abraham has evolved into a fighter that conserves his energy until the last 20 seconds of every round at which time he attacks all out and quickly uses up energy like a roman candle without much gunpowder. Abraham was never fast to begin with during his career, but in the past couple of years Abraham has started to become even slower, and more of a plodder than he was in his youth.

This is a problem. If Abraham was fighting one of the many opponents that he fought as a middleweight in Germany, I wouldn’t mind so much and would feel comfortable that he would probably win. However, Dirrell isn’t one of the short and slow middleweights that Abraham has fought as a champion. Dirrell is both bigger and much faster than anyone that Abraham has fought before.

And when they step into the ring and start throwing punches on March 27th, Dirrell is going to expose Abraham’s lack of speed. Abraham is going to be looking to end matters early, because he knows how fast Dirrell is and will want to get him out of there anyway he can to avoid getting hit with his blazing fast shots.

I expect Abraham to load up with everything he throws, hoping and praying that he can somehow get lucky by landing a big shot that will put Dirrell down for the count. This won’t work. The reason is because Abraham will be too slow, too short and too much of a plodder to catch up to Dirrell.

I see Dirrell beating Abraham easily to the point where boxing fans will wonder what they ever saw in Abraham to begin with. I’ve seen quite a few of Abraham’s fights, and that’s why I don’t give him any chance in this fight other than landing wild shot that he gets lucky with. And that isn’t going to happen. Dirrell will see the shots coming and get out of the way of them long before the punch gets near him.