By Allan Fox: IBF/WBA/WBO light heavyweight champion Sergey Kovalev says it’s going to be a war when he gets Andre Ward inside the ring on November 19 in their long awaited fight on HBO pay-per-view from the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Ward doesn’t plan on letting the fight turn into a war, as he wants to use his boxing skills to beat Kovalev in a tactical fight. If Kovalev can turn the fight into a war on November 19, then he definitely has a good chance of winning.
Ward does not possess the power to win a war against Kovalev, so you can expect him to resist trading with him as much as possible on November 19.
“I’m ready to fight every day, any day,” said Kovalev. “It’s going to be a war. I want to kick his [expletive]. It’s my goal to defend my titles, because it was a very hard road to get these titles,” said Kovalev.
Kovalev might need to brush up on his wrestling techniques for this on, because Ward will surely be looking to grappled with him any chance he can get in this fight. Ward has used wrestling in the past to shut down his opponents when he’s faced guys that had a lot of offensive weaponry. If you look at Ward’s fights against Carl Froch, Chad Dawson, Edwin Rodriguez and Mikkel Kessler, you’ll notice that Ward used a great deal of holding and wrestling on the inside to turn the fight into a non-boxing match.
Ward wrestle and then throw short punches in between the grappling. It was ugly to watch, but it worked for him. Since making his comeback to boxing last year after a two-year layoff, Ward hasn’t resorted to the holding a mauling that he liked to do in the past. But of course, Ward hasn’t faced anyone good that he needed to use the mauling.
Ward has fought only weak opposition in Alexander Brand, Sullivan Barrera and Paul Smith. Those are not the cream of the crop at 175. In fact, the 39-year and 34-year-old Paul Smith aren’t even light heavyweights. They were picked from the super middleweight division for Ward to fight for some reason. They weren’t even the really talented super middleweights.
They were just fringe contenders. Ward’s promoters at Roc Nation Sports took it easy with him in matching him carefully to get him ready for the Kovalev fight. I’m not sure that Ward is ready or not for Kovalev, which is why it’s likely that he’ll go back to his old playbook of grappling when he gets in there on November 19, because the stuff that he’s been doing thus far in his comeback won’t work.
In each of Ward’s three comeback fights, he’s backed up against the ropes and stayed there more or less for the entire fight the way that aging fighters tend to do when they’ve lost their legs or ability to move around the ring. Fighting with his back against the ropes won’t work for Ward against Golovkin, because he’ll be a sitting duck when he gets in there.
