By Mark Hepplestall: When the super six tournament was made it was supposed to make a real undisputed champion of the Super Middleweight division, two years later and we all have more questions than answers from this awfully managed tournament. Some of the big name fighters have left and not been properly replaced, the judges and referee’s have been consistently awful and believe it or not there are more issues! Lets look at some of the big issues

Andre ward and his home advantage, if you already noticed Andre ward is the only boxer not to give anything away in this tournament. He has now completed 3 fights in his hometown and is looking to stage his next bout with Arthur Abraham in the same place. Now lets look at some of the other boxers, Mikkel Kessler went to the USA to fight Ward, got no protection from the referee and has now been retired basically by the referee not stopping Ward from headbutting.

Now making it clear it’s not Ward’s fault it’s the referee’s, as he is supposed to uphold the rules and not allow a boxer to stretch the rules in order to gain advantages in the fight. Next the dark horse Carl Froch won a close decision at home that could have gone either way depending on what you like to see in a fight and since then has been on the road, basically he will end up having only 1 out of 5 fights in his home country. The superb comeback used by many American writers, bloggers etc is that he is European and fought all his fights in Europe, unfortunately these same people do not consider the fact that almost every country in Europe has at one point in the last 100 years every single one of those countries has been at war with each other and they hate each other unlike in the USA.

An example would be The English hate the French and the German and maybe the Italians, while the above plus the Welsh, Scottish, Irish and everybody else hates the English.

So what have we learned from the Andre Ward guide to promoting a fight? Fighting in your home country is a home fight, fighting in your home state/city is a huge home fight and fighting 3 times in a row in Oakland is Showtime taking the mick.

look at the opposition, Ward has fought Kessler in a good fight, Green in an awful fight and Ward was then given two points for NOT fighting Andre Dirrell and defeating Sakio Bika instead. Okay the Kessler fight was great for Ward, he showed the world he wasn’t here to just make up the numbers and even though he wouldn’t have got away with the headbutts in any other country in the world he did very well, unfortunately he didn’t follow it up with a great bout. Allen Green was brought in to replace Jermaine Taylor who would have made such a better fight, unfortunately Green was awful, he didn’t really try to win, he was totally out of his depth.

Surely Showtime could have found a better fighter to take his place such as Lucian Bute, Edison Miranda, Jean Paul Mendy, Robert Stieglitz, even asking Peter Manfredo Jr to move up would have been a better idea. Next was Showtime shocked the world by just handing Andre Ward 2 points instead of making him work for them, it sort of supports the idea that the tournament is a fix. I actually thought the bout with Bika was much closer than the actual cards; I had Ward win by 4 rounds, not the official whitewash of the scorecards the judges observed.