By Scott Gilfoid: For some reason Carl Froch is seeing tonight’s fight against IBF super middleweight champion Lucian Bute as being a crucial fight for him to win. It’s unclear why Froch is putting so much emphasis on this one particular fight when he’s already had fights that were just as important for him in the past, such as the bouts against Andre Dirrell, Mikkel Kessler, Glen Johnson, Arthur Abraham and Andre Ward.

Tonight’s fight is no different.

Froch said to the chronicleherald.ca “It’s the biggest fight of my life. If I box the way I’m capable of boxing, it’ll allow me to go back to being a first rate fighter on the world scene.”

I don’t think Froch is going to be able to beat Bute if he tries to box him, so I hope that’s not his big idea to try and win this fight. The way to beat Bute isn’t by trying to out-box him. That’s going about it all wrong if you ask me. The way to beat Bute is the way that Librado Andrade did it in their first fight in 2008 by putting a lot of pressure on him and making him work harder than he wants to.

You also have to hit him a lot to the head. The one constant that Bute has had in his fights is that he rarely gets hit. The first Andrade fight was the only fight where Bute was hit a lot, and that took a lot of effort for Andrade to do so. He had to walk though tons of shots just to get his punches in. He did a great job of taking whatever Bute had to give and then landing his own shots.

It’s unfortunate that Bute was given what appeared to be a long count after getting knocked down by Andrade in the 12th because it sure looked to me like he got knocked out in that fight. But that was one fight, and Bute is a completely different fighter now. For Froch to do what Andrade did in 2008, Froch will have to take some god awful body and head shots, and I just don’t think he can take those kinds of punches.

Bute is a much better puncher now compared to back then, and he’s able to score one-punch knockouts either to the head or the body. Froch will have to take some body shots that would drop 90% of the fighters that get hit with them. Froch has a great chin there’s no doubt about that, but I don’t think he has an equal ability to take hard body shots.