By Scott Gilfoid: WBC super middleweight champion Badou Jack (19-1-1, 12 KOs) says he plans on exposing #1 WBC George Groves’ inside game this Saturday night when he defends his title against him on Showtime pay-per-view. Groves doesn’t have much of an inside game to speak of, which isn’t all that surprising because his style of fighting is more of the David Haye style in which he moves a lot on the outside.

Jack, 31, says he wants to put nonstop pressure on the 27-year-old Groves so that he can’t breathe. This is the same kind of pressure that Jack put on his last opponent former WBC super middleweight champion Anthony Dirrell last April in beating him by a close 12 round majority decision.

Groves hasn’t faced a real authentic pressure fighter before in his career. The closest thing that Groves has come to facing a pressure fighter was in his 2011 fight against James DeGale. Groves build up a lead in the first six rounds of the fight with his hit and run fighting style, and then in the second half of the contest, DeGale rallied big time in putting tremendous pressure on Groves to wear him down.

I had DeGale winning the last 6 rounds of the fight plus one of the first six rounds to edge Groves, but the judges saw it differently. I wasn’t surprised that DeGale lost the fight because the crowd was booing him nonstop from the moment he stepped foot into the ring. But he clearly won the fight but found himself on the receiving end of a good old fashioned controversial decision.

“I think I’ll expose his inside game,” Jack said about Groves to Fighthub. “In the second fight, he [Froch] put him to sleep. That’s what I plan to do. I’m just going to be prepared to go against the best George Groves. I don’t think it’ll go 12 rounds,” Jack said.

Groves is obviously going to try and keep Jack from getting to the inside on him in this fight by using moving and a ton of holding I suspect. If Badou is smart, he’ll have been working on fighting through the clinches that he’ll be dealing with, because if he just lets Groves grab him every time to shut off his pressure, then this could be an easy fight for Groves.

We saw how Groves’ fellow countryman IBF welterweight champion Kell Brook clinched Shawn Porter all night long on the inside to shut down his superior inside game last year to get a win. The referee working the fight arguably should have taken off numerous points from Brook for his frequent holding, but he failed to do so. Groves will very likely take a page out of Brook’s holding game plan by using the same strategy against Badou, because he doesn’t have any inside game to speak of.

It’s going to be interesting to see how effective Badou can be with his pressure against Groves. Badou is going to need fast feet in this fight to cut off the ring because he’s not going to be able to catch up to Groves by shuffling slowly like he was in the Dirrell fight.