By Michael Collins: If you were to pick the worst possible guy for Carl Froch (28-2, 20 KO’s) to fight coming off of his mostly one-sided loss to WBA super middleweight champion Andre Ward from last December that fighter would have to be IBF super middleweight champion Lucian Bute (30-0, 24 KO’s). With his big power, excellent boxing skills, huge size and hit & retreat fighting style, Bute is pretty much impressive for a slow fighter like Froch to beat.
Froch and Bute will be facing each other on May 26th in Froch’s home city in Nottingham, UK at the Nottingham Arena. 9000 fans are expected to fill the arena on May 26th, and the vast majority of them will be loud Froch fans, looking to push him to victory. Froch seems to fight well when fighting at home, and that could help him to a certain degree to pull out a little something from his body to try and beat Bute.
However, it’s not likely that Froch will get the win even with home advantage. The last time Froch fought at home, he we was pushed to the limits by a younger, less experienced Andre Dirrell in a fight that Froch appeared to lose. He won it by a 12 round split decision, but besides the controversy over the scoring of the fight, Froch got away with a high number of fouls that likely would have seen him lose multiple points with different referee working the fight.
Froch got the win, but he far from beatable at home and probably deserved to lose the fight by a minimum of four rounds. Bute is a lot more difficult offensively than Dirrell, and perhaps just as good on defense. This puts Froch in a bind where he’s going to have to be willing to take a lot of punishment to get a win in this fight. It’s more than Froch taking punishment to get at Bute. Froch is going to have to pressure the new Canadian citizen Bute from the outset, and really load up for when he can land his shots.
Bute will be setting traps looking to land his powerful body shots and uppercuts. You know what Bute is going to do, but the question is can Froch take those big shots all night long to get the opportunity to land his own punches? Froch has a reputation for having a steel chin. However, I don’t think he’s going to want to keep coming forward once he gets hit really hard a half dozen times by Bute’s body shots and uppercuts. We may see Froch backing off and just trying to survive rather than doing what he has to in order to get the victory.