By Marcus Richardson: WBA super middleweight champion Andre Ward (25-0, 13 KO’s) ended WBC super middleweight champion Carl Froch’s dream tonight by beating him by a fairly lopsided 12 round unanimous decision to win the Super Six tournament and take home the trophy at the Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
The judges’ scores were way out of touch with the actual fight except for the judge that scored it 118-110 for Ward. The other two judges saw it as a close fight for some reason, scoring it 115-113 and 115-113. You’d have to have given Froch a lot of mercy rounds to see the fight that close, because frankly Ward dominated the entire fight. I only saw Froch maybe getting one round at best.
Froch was just too slow and was getting clocked by Ward in every round. Ward even had Froch stunned a couple of times. Using his jab and straight right hands, Ward cruised through the first six rounds, hitting Froch with nice shots and picking off or dodging Froch’s slow attempted.
By the second half of the fight, Froch was desperate and in need of a knockout. His beak was a bright red from the shots Ward had bounced off it and it’s a wonder how it wasn’t broken. Ward continued to dominate in the second half of the fight, nailing a now sad looking Froch with lefts and right hands, and falling into him a lot for clinches.
Ward looked like a combination of Bernard Hopkins and Floyd Mayweather Jr. in there. Froch just looked like Froch. He was too slow and falling further behind. At the end of the 8th, Froch nailed Ward with his best shot of the night, a beautiful right hand. Too bad it happened after the round had ended and Ward had put down his guard. Froch got a tongue lashing from referee Steve Smoger for that. Ward got the better of Froch on the inside in the 9th, 10th and 11th rounds. Froch did come out firing on all four cylinders in the 12th and was doing a reasonably good job until Ward staggered him at the end of the round.
I think the scoring of this fight was downright strange because I couldn’t see Froch winning one round. He got shut out on by card and gosh he looked awful.
With this win Ward can move on to face either Mikkel Kessler or preferably IBF super middleweight champion Lucian Bute. As for Froch, I suppose he can fight Jean Pascal again or something like that. I don’t see the point of that fight because Pascal just lost and looked horrible but that’s the fight that Froch has been talking about for a 100 years now. Ideally, Froch needs to go after Bute and see if he can beat Ward to that fight or Kessler. Froch needs to redeem himself after this awful performance.
In other action on the card:
Bowie Tupou UD 10 Donnell Holmes
Edison Miranda TKO5 Kariz Kariuki
Cornelius White UD 6 Yordanis Despaigne
Kell Brook TKO 5 Luis Galarza