By Scott Gilfoid: Former World Boxing Council (WBC) super middleweight champion Carl Froch (26-1, 20 KO’s) has a very important bout coming up on November 27th against Arthur Abraham (31-1, 25 KO’s) in the stage 3 part of the Super Six tournament, at the Hartwall Arena, Helsinki, Finland. Froch, 33, is still nursing a hurt back, which caused him to postpone his October 2nd bout with Abraham until November 27th. Abraham is pretty much fed up with Froch, and sees him carrying around mental baggage from his earlier loss to Mikkel Kessler in April of this year.

In an article at the Mirror.co.uk, Abraham says “It is all mental with him. The Kessler fight is still in the head of Froch. He is still thinking about it.” Froch seems convinced that he should have won the fight and has been wasting time harping about it instead of focusing on his next fight against Abraham. Froch says “Most people thought I beat Kessler, and those who don’t still had the fight very close.”

I don’t know where Froch is getting his information from, because I rarely see anyone saying that they thought Froch beat Kessler, and I certainly don’t think Froch did. I thought the fight was close, but not close enough to hand the victory to Froch. But why is chap so focused on what already happened? Froch is probably going to have even more reason to bellyache if Abraham knocks him out like I think he will.

Instead of living in the past about the Kessler fight, Froch should learn from the two biggest mistakes he made in that fight, which were not guarding his head and fighting too passively until the end. Froch might have won the fight if he had fixed just one of those areas. I don’t think Froch can really fix his poor defense. I think the guy will always fight with his hands down by his waist, leading with his chin. But I do think Froch can fight a lot more aggressive earlier in the bout to give Abraham problems.

Froch has to fight a lot harder and hope that his chin holds out form the huge bombs that he’s going to being getting hit with all fight long. This wouldn’t be an issue, of course, if Froch would just hold his hands up every once in a while in front of his head, but that’s not how Froch fights. He likes to inch up to his opponents with his hands hanging low, looking to land shots from his waist.

It’s a strange style of fighting and clearly it’s not working for Froch anymore, but I think he’s too old to make any changes with it. So he needs to try and be more aggressive and hope that he can win a decision somehow without getting knocked out.