By Scott Gilfoid: The 2nd round of the Super Six tournament started on March 27th with Andre Dirrell defeating Arthur Abraham by an 11th round disqualification victory. But I’ve seen enough from this fight and the first stage of the Super Six tournament to come to the conclusion that the European fighters look stiff, robotic and almost entirely inflexible with their ring movements and fighting style. It’s quite amazing to see the difference between the stiff robotic Europeans like Carl Froch, Arthur Abraham and Mikkel Kessler compared to the more loose, more limber American fighters like the talented Andre Dirrell and Andre Ward.

Jermain Taylor, who is no longer is taking part in the Super Six tournament, was also very flexible and seemingly more athletic than his counterparts from the European side. Obviously, being flexible doesn’t translate into winning fights as we saw with Taylor’s loss to Abraham, and Dirrell’s questionable defeat against Froch. But it is something that makes you wonder about the different training that brings this about.

Why are the Euro fighters really stiff and robotic looking? Is it because they’re using more weight lifting, less running and less stretching? It’s not just that they’re less flexible. The European fighters in the Super Six seem to be slower as well in terms of hand speed. Ward and Dirrell are blazing fast with their hands and ring movements, while in contrast, Froch, Abraham and Kessler are rather slow.

This isn’t the case with all European fighters, of course, because there are many of them that are incredibly fast like Joe Calzaghe and Andy Lee. However, the European fighters that were picked are painfully slow, as if none of them having any fast twitch reflexes. Lucian Bute, perhaps the best fighter in the super middleweight division, has incredibly fast hands. It’s too bad he didn’t take part in the tournament because he would make things interesting.

At least he would be able to somewhat match Dirrell and Ward with their fast hands and we could see some really amazing boxing match. Thus far, I’ve been disappointed in the fights I’ve seen. Dirrell was just way faster than Froch, and really was making him look bad for much of the fight with his hands speed. Froch turned it physical and the fight became like a mixture of MMA, wrestling a slam dancing. It was ugly.

And in Dirrell’s recent fight with the slow moving Abraham, Dirrell beat him like a punching bag for most of the fight. It was good to see it, but boring at the same time because Abraham was too slow most of the time to land anything. Abraham ended way behind in the fight and fouled out of the bout with a shot to Dirrell’s head after he slipped to the canvas. Would Abraham had done this if he had better hand speed and been able to keep up with Dirrell for the entire fight. I don’t think he would have. The Kessler-Ward fight was another case of a European fighter being too slow to deal with Ward’s fast hands. It really came down to Ward just being way too fast for Kessler, and the fight ended up being a huge mismatch.

Froch, Kessler and Abraham just seem like wax figures at times. They just stand there too much with ther hand either way up by their heads or down by their wastes and don’t seem to move well at all compared to Dirrell and Ward. Allan Green, the replacement for Taylor, is also a fighter with amazing hand speed and ring movement. This is going to be interesting to see him when he gets matched against one of the fighters from Europe.