As much as it annoys me to concede, I underestimated Carl Froch's chances of beating Arthur Abraham. Froch pulled off a nearly perfect rout of "King Arthur" in Helsinki tonight, showing skill, footspeed and endurance, making Abraham look like an amateur stuck in slow-motion for most of the fight. One tender-hearted judge found a round to give to Abraham, with the Super Six Classic producing yet another landslide victory and tailor-made redemption story.
The drama of an Abraham fight used to be that he would typically give away half the fight with his turtle-shell defense before coming out of it to stalk and knock his opponent out in the last few rounds. But that was when he was a middleweight, and his KO power clearly has not stayed with him on his journey to 168 pounds. He managed to score a victory using his middleweight playbook against a faded fellow middleweight in Jermaine Taylor, but he's looked slow and weak against natural super-middles like Andre Dirrell and Froch. Not much drama watching a guy block most of his opponent's punches for a half-hour [with the occasional burst of offensive that usually whiz past the other guy and leave the puncher cringe-inducingly off-balance] when it's clear that the turtle doesn't have enough pop to knock out a somewhat bigger rabbit, even if he manages to actually land a flush punch. As impressive as this particular Super Six rout was, it was also boring and unlikely to reward multiple viewings the way that Ward-Kessler does.
I've mentioned before how odd it is that there was almost no talk about how Abraham was a fairly small middleweight moving up a weight class to take part in this tournament; I now have five bucks that says this jump will now be discussed ad nauseam until Abraham scores another win at 168. With Showtime's announcement that the Semifinal Stage's fights will be Froch vs. Glen Johnson and Abraham vs. the top-ranked Andre Ward, I doubt this chatter will be going away soon. With an even faster, cagier opponent in his immediate future, it seems likely that the illegal right hook he landed on Dirrell when he was already on the canvas will be the last powerful punch Arthur Abraham landed as a super-middleweight.
I know I said it about today's Froch-Abraham fight, but: Froch-Johnson should be a highly entertaining brawl.
As for the other fights tonight: Eh. Barring some unforseeable calamity, they should all go to the house fighter -- Ward should easily outwork and frustrate Sakio Bika as the live fight packaged with Froch-Abraham on Showtime.
On HBO's counterprogramming: It's extremely easy to like Michael Katsidis and his fights are always entertaining, but a face-first, right-handed brawler who rarely has a Plan B if a fight's not going his way is easy pickings for a master counterpuncher like Juan Manuel Marquez, assuming Marquez doesn't grow old climbing into the ring. Katsidis has already been knocked out by the shadow that once was Joel Casamayor, who was then knocked out by Marquez in a matchup that certainly would have fired all of my boxing-nerd neurons at once if it had been held in, say, 2004. Katsidis followed up the KO by being outworked by Juan Diaz, whom Marquez has also carved up and knocked out. You would think the last few years in the lightweight division played out like the first ten seconds of this scene from DOLEMITE:
Andre Berto collects yet another check in yet another showcase bout against the unheralded Freddy Hernandez, and Celestino Caballero travels outside his weight class to keep busy and waste everyone's time in a match with journeyman Jason Litzau. Hurray. At least Ward-Bika and Marquez-Katsidis should be worth watching more than once. Three out of five ain't bad for the end of the year.
9:30PM Update: Bika stole the show despite not winning the fight; he made a real fight of it and headbutted a layer or two of inevitability off Ward's glorious future as Super Six victor and super-middleweight king-to-be.
From the sounds of it, Katsidis righteously gave Marquez hell until being stopped in the ninth round. Berto took Hernandez out in the first, a mercy for the audience as much as the grossly mismatched tomato can. And, a clearly unprepared Caballero -- having zero interest in the HBO undercard, I skipped the weigh-ins and didn't know that Caballero came in a whole 1.5 pounds over the super-featherweight limit, despite being a career featherweight; that's almost fuck-you-I-didn't-want-to-fight-anyway overweight -- dropped a split decision to Litzau. I hope that Bika and Katsidis get another significant fight soon despite their losses, and the same for Litzau despite his upsetting the best-laid plans of his opponent's more powerful management.
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