(Picture: Photo Wende / Team Sauerland) By Sean McDaniel: Promoter Kallie Sauerland who promotes former IBF middleweight champion Arthur Abraham (33-3, 27 KO’s), thinks he should hang up his gloves if he gets beaten on Saturday night against Piotr Wilczewski (30-1, 10 KO’s) at the Sparkenhassen Arena, Kiel, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. Abraham hasn’t looked good at super middleweight, yet he persists at fighting at this weight.

Sauerland told the Bild.de “Arthur loses, I advise him to quit.”

Abraham has lost three out of his last five fights but somehow the World Boxing Organization has him ranked at number #2 and the WBA #4. That obviously will be corrected on Saturday night if Abraham loses to Wilczewski and there’s a very good possibility he’ll lose this fight. Wilczewski is a very good fighter. He gave James DeGale fits in their fight last October and probably should have been the won that had his hand raised at the end of the fight. Wilczewski out-boxed a very good boxer in DeGale and was the stronger fighter of the two.

Abraham doesn’t have the same skills that DeGale has, but he’s a bigger puncher. The only thing that Wilczewski has to worry about with Abraham is getting caught with a big shot. Minus that, then Wilczewski wins this fight on boxing skill and work rate. Abraham still only fights hard for the last 30 seconds of every round rather than for the full three minutes.

Wilczewski is a much busier fighter and will be outworking Abraham every step of the way. Abraham’s work rate problem was supposed to have been fixed when he moved up in weight from the middleweight division. The argument was that Abraham couldn’t fight hard for three minutes of every round because he was weight drained from having to take off so much weight to get to 160. However, now that he’s at 168, Abraham still has the same problems.

So perhaps this is problem he can’t get rid of no matter what weight he climbs to or possibly Abraham needs to move up to 175 to fight. He walks around at over 180. However, he’s much too short at 5’9″ to make an impact at light heavyweight and it doesn’t look like he can make 160 anymore. This would seem to be Abraham’s last chance at 168. If he can’t even beat Wilczewski, then he probably needs to retire because there are a number of better fighters than him at this weight and we already saw how badly Abraham was out-boxed by Carl Froch, Andre Dirrell and Andre Ward.