By Michael Collins: Former super middleweight champion Mikkel Kessler (44-2, 33 KO’s) will be looking to find success in a new weight division next month when he moves up to light heavyweight to take on former super middleweight contest in the Super Six tournament Allan Green (31-3, 21 KO’s) at the Parken in Copenhagen, Denmark. Green, 32, could no longer make weight in the super middleweight division and was forced to move up to 175 to try and turn things around.
The move obviously came a little too late for Green, because he was beaten pretty easily by Glen Johnson and Andre Ward in the Super Six tournament. Green seems to like the new change in weight, as he’s won his last two fights at light heavyweight against Craig Gandy and Sebastian Demers. Those two aren’t in the same class as Kessler, and Green should return to getting easily beaten when he faces Kessler. Of course, maybe Green really was easily beaten due to him being weight drained? We’ll see in his fight against Kessler. If he looks as terrible as he did in the Super Six, then he’ll lose badly and we’ll have a clearer picture about Green.
Kessler can’t afford to lose this fight if he wants to accomplish some of the goals that he has for himself in this weight division. One of those goals is to take on the winner of the April 28th fight between WBC light heavyweight champion Bernard Hopkins and Chad Dawson. Kessler might have a good chance of beating the 47-year-old Hopkins, but he’ll probably struggle badly in his fight against Dawson. That’s a bad match-up for Kessler due to Dawson’s size, speed and power. Kessler might not care if he gets beaten, although he probably will. If Kessler wants to succeed without worry, he needs to go after the weaker champions at light heavyweight like WBO champion Nathan Cleverly, IBF champ Tavoris Cloud or WBO champ Beibut Shumenov.