By Jim Dower: World Boxing Council super middleweight champion Mikkel Kessler (43-2, 32 KO’s) could end up making a fatal mistake and overlook his next Super Six tournament opponent American Allan Green (29-2, 20 KO’s) and figure him for an easy mark in their upcoming September 25th Super Six tournament fight at the MCH Multiarena, in Herning, Denmark. It will be easy to look bad the 30-year-old Green, because he looked less than impressive in losing by a lopsided 12 round unanimous decision loss to WBA super middleweight champion Andre Ward in his last fight on June 19th in the Super Six tournament. Right now, Kessler is still happy with his win over former WBC super middleweight champion Carl Froch in his last fight on April 24th, and could see the Green fight as a huge step down form that grueling bout. However, Green hits every bit as hard as Froch, and is a lot faster him in terms of hand speed.

Green is badly in need of a win and has very little pressure on him now that no one expects him to do anything against Kessler other than lose to him. With the pressure off, Green can go all out and give Kessler a lot of problems with his power shots and fast hands. Kessler might be in for a big surprise when he sees how much faster Green is compared to his last opponent Froch. It’s going to be like night and day for Kessler. Green looks really beatable when you take a look at his loss to Ward, but there’s a couple of things that are different from that bout and the one that he’s going into on September 25th.

First of all, Green was over-trained for the Ward fight and ended up taking off too much weight in trying to get down to the 168 pound limit for the division. The weight loss led to Green having not enough strength to fight with Ward and caused him to spend much of the fight just trying to hold on with his back against the ropes. This time, Green is much better about his training and isn’t over-doing it to get prepared for Kessler. This means that Kessler is going to be facing a much stronger Green than the one that fought Ward last June. The other thing was that Ward spent much of the fight in close to keep Green from being able to extend on his power shots. Ward did a heck of a job doing this and this prevented Green from loading up on his shots the way he wanted to. Kessler isn’t an inside fighter and won’t be able to smother Green in the same way that Ward did.

Instead of fighting on the inside, Kessler is going to stay on the outside and try to fight Green that way. Green does really well against fighters like Kessler than try to bomb him from long distance, and this will allow Green to load up on his shots and get full leverage on his punches.