By Scott Gilfoid: It’s a question that we won’t know until the first punches are sent flying on March 27th, but based on observing the last handful of fights of Arthur Abraham and Andre Dirrell, I’d have to say that Abraham is far too slow to compete with Dirrell. Some slow fighters are able to compensate for their lack of hand speed by timing their opponents to try and ambush them at a place where they expect them to be. It’s not easy to do though, because most of the time the slower fighter will simply misjudge the timing of the faster opponent and end up missing.

There’s also the problem of the faster fighters throwing quick shots that the slow fighter never even sees and ends up getting hurt by the shots. I suspect this is what’s going to happen with Abraham in his stage 2 Super Six fight with Dirrell. Abraham is one of the slowest fighters I’ve seen in the super middleweight division. He seems to not only be slow of hand, but also slow of foot as well.

And a weird thing about Abraham is that he seems to have problems bending his arms. At least that’s what I see of him when he fights. Abraham throws these bizarre looking wide shots with his arm almost completely straight like he’s swinging a baseball bat. I don’t mean that in a good way either. Its like has no flexibility in his arms and his slow punches make it even more pronounced.

I don’t if his speed is missing because of his bizarre way of punching or the other way around. Whatever the case, I think he’s way over his head in this fight against Dirrell, and I think Abraham is going to get badly beaten and humiliated on March 27th. It’s going to be one of those really bad defeats where the fighter loses every round, and the fans get bored with the fight.

Abraham kind of reminds me of a slow throwback fighter from yesterday, who is magically transported to the 21st century where he attempts to compete against a world class athlete and fails miserably. This is what I see happening with Abraham.

It’s not all bad though. I think Abraham will make it to the semifinals because he’s facing Carl Froch in his stage 3 bout, I think Abraham is going to destroy Froch and make it to the next level of the tourney. He won’t it, but he’ll at least buy himself some time and be able to lick his wounds from his fight with Dirrell.

Dirrell is got things good for him in this fight. Abraham is tailor made for him, a fighter who loads up on everything he throws and who spends almost every second of every round just covering up and resting. Abraham doesn’t throw anything until the very end of the round when he lets fly a few awful looking shots.

Abraham then goes back to his corner and gasps for breath as if he ran a marathon or something. I don’t understand how he can get so tired when he hardly throws anything until the last 20 seconds of the round. Moving up in weight was supposed to help Abraham’s stamina, but it doesn’t appear to have had any effect on him.