By Michael Collins: Carl Froch is unhappy that the bookmakers overwhelmingly seeing him as the loser tonight in his fight against IBF super middleweight champion Lucian Bute. Froch obviously isn’t new to being the underdog, as he was in that role in his fight against WBA World super middleweight champion Andre Ward last December. But for some reason it seems to bother Froch a lot more that a fighter he still considers unproven like Bute is being picked to beat him tonight.
Froch told the dailystar.co.uk “The bookies don’t know f**** all! The same bookmakers who don’t give me a chance in this fight all had Arthur Abraham to beat me. I rest my case. I am fighting in my hometown of Nottingham in front of a capacity crowd and that is the icing on the cake for me.”
I think Froch is kidding himself if he thinks Bute and Abraham are the same kind of opponents. There may have been a few people who saw Abraham beating Froch, but there weren’t nearly as many compared to the people who see Bute beating him. Abraham always was a short 5’9” middleweight fighting out of his weight class. He was exposed by Andre Dirrell before Froch got to him. You can’t say the same thing about Bute, because nobody has beaten this guy, and he’s not small at 6’2”. Bute is taller than Froch and he fights well on the outside and is hard to hit unlike Abraham.
I think the bookies are just going with the smart pick in tonight’s fight. It would be risky thing for them to choose Froch, because he’s so easy to hit and so much slower than Bute. He’s also a bigger puncher than Froch. The only thing that Froch has going for him in this fight is his chin and the crowd, and that’s not going to be enough unless Bute falls apart mentally.