By Sean McDaniel: Writer Steve Bunch feels that former WBC super middleweight champion Carl Froch has been in too many tough fights recently and he feels that this caught up with his last Saturday night in his loss to Andre Ward in the Super Six tournament. Bunce thinks Froch’s battles in the Super Six tournament, which he fought Andre Dirrell, Glen Johnson, Mikkel Kessler, Arthur Abraham and Ward did a number on Froch by wearing him down.

To be sure, Froch did take punishment along the way, but only in the Kessler and Ward fights. The other bouts against Johnson, Dirrell and Abraham were ones where Froch didn’t get hit all that much. He was able to evade shots and/or fight on the inside in the case of Dirrell to avoid shots.

Bunce doesn’t like the idea of Froch facing IBF super middleweight champion Lucian Bute next. Instead, Bunce thinks Froch should take an easy fight for his next bout and then look to take on Kessler once Kessler has picked up the WBO super middleweight title from Robert Stieglitz in April. It will work perfectly for Froch to take a soft fight in early 2012 while he’s waiting for the Kessler-Stieglitz fight to take place.

Froch then would be in the perfect position to fight Kessler for his WBO title in either Denmark or England. In either case, the fights will be huge and Froch would have a good chance of winning. But by going straight into a hard fight against Bute, Froch might not be ready for that kind of war with all the punishment he’s absorbed recently. Bunce doubts that the Froch-Bute fight will happen anyway because he sees Bute on course to fight Ward rather than Froch.