By Scott Gilfoid: Former World Boxing Council (WBC) injured his back while training for his October 2nd Super Six tournament bout against the hard hitting Arthur Abraham (31-1, 25 KO’s). This isn’t the kind of news that the Super Six and Showtime were looking for, as former WBC super middleweight and Super Six contestant Mikkel Kessler recently dropped out of the tourney complaining of an eye injury. And the September 25th scheduled Super Six tournament between Americans Andre Ward and Andre Dirrell still doesn’t have a venue for the fight and likely won’t go ahead on this date. Froch’s bad news was just one more thing that the tournament didn’t need.

Froch lost his last fight against Kessler in April and looked lackluster for most of the fight. He has his work cut out for him against Abraham, who has one punch knockout power with either hand. Froch was pretty much wide open for every shot that Kessler threw in the fight. A postponement by Froch is probably a good thing for him, because he has a tremendous amount of things he needs to work on if he wants to prevent getting knocked out and beaten yet again. This is a fight that Froch can ill afford to lose if he wants to make it into the Super Six tourney finals against the eventual winner of the Ward-Dirrell fight.

Abraham looked massively poor in losing his last fight against the talented Dirrell last March. Dirrell made Abraham slow and limited and exposed his limited footwork, hand speed and boxing ability. With the fight firmly out of reach in the 11th round, Abraham made a huge mental error by hitting Dirrell after he had slipped and fallen on the canvas. The illegal punch caused Abraham to be disqualified by the referee.

Abraham has a lot of work ahead of him to for his next fight, because Froch no doubt is going to be studying what Dirrell did in his fight against Abraham and will likely be trying to copy him as best as he can to try and reproduce what he did to get the win. In the end, one of these two recent losers is going to end up falling out and we’ll end up with a great match-up.

However, first Froch needs to mend his back and get back in the ring. If there’s any lingering effects from a back injury, Froch will really be at a big disadvantage against Abraham. He already has his work cut out for him due to his limited defense and Abraham’s huge power. Froch needs to fight with his hands up by his head to guard against Abraham’s monstrous punches.

Froch isn’t likely to change his style of fighting with his hands hanging down uselessly by his waist despite the fact that he’s been getting clobbered in his last three fights against Jermain Taylor, Dirrell and Kessler. If I was Froch, I’d learn how to guard my head as fast as possible to keep it from getting knocked off by Abraham.