ward By Dan Ambrose:
IBF/WBA/WBO light heavyweight champion Sergey Kovalev (28-0-1, 25 KOs) defeats Andre Ward (28-0, 15 KOs) next year, says Abel Sanchez, the well-known trainer for IBF/IBO/WBA middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin.

Ward and Kovalev are on a crash course for late 2016. Both fighters sighed a 3-fight contract with HBO Boxing this week. Their third fight will be against each other next year provided that they win their first two fights of the contract.

Kovalev would seem to have the far tougher road ahead of him than Ward to get to their fight next year, as Kovalev is scheduled to fight a rematch against Jean Pascal on January 30th at the Bell Centre in Montreal, Canada.

For Kovalev’s second fight of his contract with HBO, he could be facing either WBC light heavyweight champion Adonis Stevenson or the winner of the Artur Beterbiev vs. Igor Mikhalkin.

Ward’s first fight of his three-fight contract is rumored to be against super middleweight contender Rohan Murdock at 175. There’s a big difference between Kovalev facing a quality fighter like Pascal and Ward facing little known Murdock.

If Ward faces another easy opponent for his second fight of his contract with HBO, then he’ll have little problems getting to the Kovalev fight without suffering a loss.

Sanchez doesn’t think that the 31-year-old Ward has what it takes to defeat the hard hitting Kovalev right now due to Ward’s inactivity since winning the Super Six tournament. Ward has been on a vacation for the most part since beating Carl Froch in 2011.

Ward has been plagued by promotional problems, injuries and a lack of quality opponents willing to fight him. The combination of the three has limited Ward to just three fights in the last four fights.

You can’t really count Ward’s last fight against Paul Smith as being a fight because that was such a mismatch that you can call it an exhibition fight rather than a real one. Smith, a 2nd tier fighter with not much going for him, came into the fight looking flabby and not trained at all.

“I think Kovalev beats him,” Sanchez said to Fighthub about Ward losing to Kovalev in late 2016. “After the Super Six, when Andre ward busy, was active and was sharp, then I could say it’s a good fight. At this point, Kovalev is just on a roll and active an Andre is sitting back, waiting for something to happen, waiting for someone to knock on the door and say ‘here’s a whole lot of money to fight,’ when you’ve fought only twice in four years. What would Kovalev do to Paul Smith?”

Kovalev has the punching power to give Ward a lot of problems, and he’s also got the size and the jab. Ward doesn’t have to take the fight if he doesn’t want to. He could always drag his feet when it comes time for the negotiations to begin, and instead say he wants a fight against Gennady Golovkin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXKUKBMmHn4

It’s just going to be very hard for Ward to get Golovkin without moving down in weight to middleweight. I doubt that Golovkin will even bother accommodating Ward at this point by giving him a catch-weight.