By Ted Ringer: In looking at the April 24th fight between WBC super middleweight Carl Froch (26-0, 20 KO’s) and challenger Mikkel Kessler (42-2, 32 KO’s) the thing that jumps out at me immediately is the vast differences in their apparent skills level. Kessler, 31, is a fighter with vast talent and extraordinary boxing ability that few people can question. Kessler is one of those rare fighters that can box just as well as he can slug. He’s quite comfortable doing either and can switch back from one mode to another based on the circumstances in a fight.

This is what makes Kessler so hard to beat. He’s not tough to fight because of his boxing ability, but he can pulverize his opponents with his powerful combinations and right hand power. In contrast, Froch is a puncher. That’s basically what he is. Froch lives and dies by his ability to try and take his opponents out with his big shots. If Froch can’t stop his opponents with his big shots, he finds himself in a tough situation where the fight is very much on the line and he’s in danger of losing.

Froch still hasn’t faced what you could call true top tier opponents as of yet, but the ones he has faced – Jean Pascal, Jermain Taylor, and Andre Dirrell – have given Froch a lot of trouble with their boxing ability. Froch beat all three but he was in the process of getting beaten by Taylor and luckily pulled out the fight with a 12th round knockout. And in the Dirrell fight, many people think that Froch got what is considered to be a hometown decision fighting in front of his home fans in Nottingham, England.

On April 24th, Froch will likely find himself in a similar situation where he will be living and dying by his need to knock Kessler out. If Froch isn’t able to score a knockout in this fight, there’s a very good chance he’ll end up getting outpointed by Kessler, who will be fighting in front of his home crowd in MCH Messecenter Herning, in Herning, Denmark. Kessler is good at everything that Froch is not – moving, jabbing and defending from punches. Kessler is a skilled boxing technician and perhaps the most skilled fighter in the Super Six tournament. That doesn’t mean that he has the most natural talent, because he’s clearly not as fast and athletic as Dirrell and Ward, but he is still close enough.

Froch is very predictable in what he’s going to do. He typically plods forward by a jab, which is kind of a pushing jab rather than one that snaps with authority. If Froch hits you with the jab, it often shoves you back a little because it’s kind of a shove rather an actual jab. It’s an odd punch, but so slow that it can easily be picked off or ducked under. Froch likes to throw a lot of left hooks and right hands that start from his waist because that’s where he keeps his hands.

Froch doesn’t hold his arms up to cover his torso like most fighters do, but instead uses the style that faster fighters like Sergio Martinez and Floyd Mayweather Jr. It doesn’t work nearly as well for Froch, because it’s a style in which you need really fast hands and reaction time to make it work well. Froch’s hand speed is not good and his ability to react to incoming fire isn’t good either. But for some reason Froch sticks to his style of keeping his hands down despite the fact that it might actually be working against him by making him easier to hit and taking him longer to get his punches from his waist to his opponent.

I see Froch as being tailor made for Kessler. Froch will be inching forward like a tall crane and getting hit with a withering fire of steady jabs and left-right combinations from Kessler all throughout the fight. It might get bad enough so that fight could be stopped altogether at some point because Froch will be taking shots too often without getting his hands up. Froch’s only chance of winning is to try to lure Kessler into a toe-to-toe battle. But Kessler will be smarter than that. He won’t fight a dumb fight, and instead will jab Froch’s head constantly and stay on the outside.