By Scott Gilfoid: Last Saturday’s fight was a horrible display of sportsmanship with Arthur Abraham not only blasting away at a fallen Andre Dirrell while he was on the canvas, but also afterwards the fight with Abraham suggesting that Dirrell had acted being hurt from the punch that he was hit with by Abraham. I somehow had suspected that Dirrell would end up getting fouled and roughed up for some reason.

I was hoping that Abraham would keep it clean, but in the back of my mind I had a feeling that he would start fouling out frustration at some point in the fight due to his inability to land any significant shoots against Dirrell. Out of curiosity, I re-watched Dirrell’s Super Six stage 1 fight between him and World Boxing Council super middleweight champion Carl Froch, a fight which was marred by fouls last October. Froch, fighting in front of a large British crowd in Nottingham, England, had the devil of a time trying to land his slow shots against Dirrell.

If you thought that Abraham missed a lot of his punches, you aught to see how many punches Froch was missing on that night. He missed constantly, one after another, and seemed only able to land anything at all when he had one arm wrapped around Dirrell. It was a fight in which Dirrell fought magnificently, making Froch miss all night long and hammering him with hard shots.

In the 10th, Dirrell staggered Froch with a straight left to the head. By the end of the fight, I thought this would be an easy one of the fight judges to score, as I had given Dirrell the victory by the scores of 8 rounds to three with one even. One referee scored it for Dirrell, whereas the other two had Froch winning the fight. But besides the poor scoring of the fight, the fouls that I saw from Froch were numerous starting from the 5th round.

I saw Dirrell get body slammed, hit with rabbit punches in pretty every round from the 5th until the 11th, and holding & hitting. I saw quite bit of the later. It is what it is. The fouls in themselves should have been dealt with by the referee, because Dirrell was left to plead his case to the referee after the fouls. It soon became clear that Dirrell was wasting his time.

In his fight with Abraham, Dirrell didn’t give him many chances to foul because Andre was smart enough to stay beyond the reach of Abraham. I can only imagine what would have had Dirrell been standing within punching range all night long.

I’d like to think that Dirrell has gone through the worst of it in terms of fouls, but I think Dirrell will continue to have problems for the remainder of the Super Six tournament. Dirrell has Mayweather-like talent, and because of his ability to make opponents miss and look bad, some of them get frustrated and wanted to foul. I guess Dirrell is too talented for his own good.