By Scott Gilfoid: Carl Froch is really up against it tonight in his bout against the hardest body puncher in boxing IBF super middleweight champion Lucian Bute. It’s going to be a tough ask for Froch to be able to finish this fight on his feet I hate to say. I see Froch’s weak spot being his ability to take body shots.

Indeed, I some of the British fighters tend to ignore this part of the game and focus a little too much in throwing head shots from the outside.

I’ve already seen some of Froch’s reactions in the past when hit hard to the body in fights against Mikkel Kessler and Andre Ward. Froch looked clearly bothered by the shots.

Froch is now about to fight someone who hits even harder to the body than those guys. I don’t know how Froch is going to be able to take Bute’s body shots, because he’s so easy to hit. Froch does tend to hold his hands low around his waist level, so that could help him in theory. But he’ll be wide open to Bute’s left hand smash uppercut to the head and that’s going to be a big probably for Froch. I mean, he can’t block both areas. Either Froch guards his head of his body, but he won’t be able to keep Bute from landing one of those places.

My advice is for Froch to try and keep from getting hit to the body, because Bute is especially dangerous with his body punching. If Froch gets nailed to the body, there won’t be much he can do to keep on his feet. He’ll go down like a sack of potatoes for the count. He can take a head shot, and maybe even some – but not all – of Bute uppercut head shots. But I don’t think Froch will be able to take more than a half dozen of Bute’s huge body shots without taking the 10 count on the canvas. That should be Froch’s main area of concern here.

I think it’s a little late in the game for Froch to be able to train to take the kinds of body shots he’ll be getting tagged with tonight by Bute. It takes a long time for a fighter to learn to take those kinds of shots on a consistent basis and I don’t see Froch being able to learn in time for tonight’s bout.

Froch can’t just hope that Bute doesn’t land one of his big shots, because eventually Froch will miss a shot and Bute will be waiting for him like a big spider to land one of his finishing body shots.