By Scott Gilfoid: Carl Froch can’t understand why his opponent for this Saturday night IBF super middleweight champion Lucian Bute has been playing loud crowd noises during his training sessions in order to get ready for the loud cheering/booing that he’ll be hearing on Saturday night when he faces Froch in his hometown in the Nottingham Arena in Nottingham, UK.

Bute, who has fought most of his career at home in Canada or his birth country of Romanian, hasn’t had to deal with fighting in a stranger’s hometown before. This is going to be a new experience for Bute, and he’s trying the best he can to get ready for it ahead of time so that it doesn’t catch him off guard and intimidate him.

Froch told the BBC “You can hear Rachel [Froch’s girlfriend] screaming. I couldn’t think of anything worse while I’m training. It’s comical and strange at the same time. It’s quite funny and a bit weird, but whatever his psychologist is telling him, he’s obviously listening.”

I don’t think it’s weird at all that Bute is doing this, because without the experience of having fought in another fighter’s hometown, he needs some kind of way of getting accustomed to what he’ll be facing when he faces Froch in the Nottingham Arena in Saturday night. Football teams in the United States sometimes play loud crowd noises when practicing two minutes offense drills, and it works because these teams aren’t as stunned as they would be when they get into situations where the quarterback can’t be heard through the crowd noise.

Bute has an advantage in that he doesn’t need to hear snap signals. All he has to do is focus on Froch, setting traps, and out-boxing him. It’s not going to be all that hard because Froch is slower than most of the guys that Bute has been fighting in the last few years. Bute won’t have to deal with hand speed. He’ll just have to deal with the judges, and hope they aren’t influenced by the crowd noise.