By Scott Gilfoid: It didn’t take long for WBA super middleweight champion Andre Ward respond to the news of former super middleweight champion Joe Calzaghe blabbering about how he would have beaten Ward if they had fought in the past. Ward’s comment to that response was this on his social media site: “Yeah, it’s easy to say that from the comfort of your couch!!”
Earlier last week, Calzaghe had told Sky Sports News “I would have beaten Ward…I think Ward is good in his comfort zone, but I would have gotten him out of that and he wouldn’t have fancied it.”
Gee, it’s too bad that Calzaghe chose not to fight Ward in 2008 because Ward wanted the fight but Calzaghe showed no interest in facing him. I wonder why.
It’s easy for Calzaghe to flap his gums now after the fact, but when he had the chance to fight Ward in 2008, instead he chose to fight older guys like Bernard Hopkins and Roy Jones Jr. On top of that, Calzaghe’s win over Hopkins was highly controversial to the point where there should have been a rematch, but there wasn’t one. Hopkins wanted a rematch but Calzaghe instead retired. Both Hopkins and Jones dropped Calzaghe.
Just in watching how both Calzaghe and Ward beat the same opponent Mikkel Kesslier, it’s painfully obvious that Ward would have likely trounced Calzaghe had the Welsh fighter opted to fight Ward.
Calzaghe struggled badly to defeat Kessler in their fight in 2007; whereas Ward beat Kessler with ease in their fight in the Super Six tournament in 2009. Many Calzaghe’s loyal fans think that one of the main reasons why Ward had such an easy time beating Kessler was because he had deteriorated somewhat from the punishment he took in his loss to Calzaghe.
I don’t buy that excuse. Kessler took a lot of slapping punches in the Calzaghe fight and he landed the much bigger blows, and it wasn’t what you would call a punishing fight for Kessler. He looked really after his loss to Calzaghe and won his next three fights with ease until running into Ward in the Super Six tournament.
Like in a lot of cases matching fighters from different eras, we’ll never know how Calzaghe would have done against Ward, just as we’d have known what would have happened if Calzaghe fought Gerald McClellan or Julian Jackson. All we know is that Calzaghe chose not to fight Ward just as he was arriving on the world scene. Instead, Calzaghe took arguably easier fights against the likes of Roy Jones Jr.
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