What makes me sort of happy (in a strange though) about reading your posts is that Andre Ward, Dirrell, Arthur Abraham and Carl Froch all disagrees with you!
I thought kessler looked fine. The fight itself was not the greatest display of pugilist skills, but both fought hard. I think kessler simply wanted it more and looked ready to weather anything to get to froch. Froch decided he wanted to box kessler and keep jim at jabs length for much of the fight.
Even though I have kessler beating green on my showtime S6 bracket, I'm not so sure of it. I have a feeling green will give ward all kinds of hell in a losing effort.
san raf, you and I seem to have a healthy mutual respect. I never realized you were in the "all Kessler fans are either Danish nationalists or closet Calzaghe fans with an agenda" camp. Would you go as far as casting that aspersion on me? Some of us who became fans of Kessler did so during his prime. Was he more than a very good, technically sound 1-2 fighter in his prime? No. It was, however a style and skillset that was effective enough against decent European (and world) level opposition, and it was pleasing to the eye. Against solid (not Ring top ten p4p, but solid) competition in Mundine, Beyer, Andrade - he looked very good, and in addition to just being a likable guy, that won him supporters. I am not a fan of Calzaghe or his slapping style (though one must at least consider that with fragile mitts, it is impressive that someone could eschew true power punching and still manage to win and win and win). He has earned my begrudging respect (particularly with the dynamic win over Kessler, where he was forced to do some very surprising things he hadn't had to do in years) but at the time they met, I was passionately rooting against him. Kessler disappointed against Calzaghe - not in terms of his will or heart, but in dimensionality. In ability to adapt and adjust. One man was able to, and the other just wasn't - it wasn't a part of his identity as a fighter. This was shown again when he ran into similar problems with another very good (potentially great) and multi-dimensional boxing-spoiler in Ward...the difference being, between the two losses his build-back performances ranged from "mediocre" to "okay" (in contrast, he looked like a monster before Calzaghe, enough so that some of us felt very comfortable favoring him 60-40). He's clearly lost some of the quickness, the timing, the surety of foot and fist placement that made him appear so much more technically sound in the middle of the 00's than at the tail end of the decade. Whether that loss is a temporary and reversible one remains to be seen...I'm not holding my breath. People age, and their physical abilities diminish. What's encouraging is that he has a fresh face (and voice) working the corner, someone who will be comfortable experimenting with different stylistic tweaks, with bringing a plan B, C, and D. No disrespect to Olsen, but that relationship had gone as far as it could go. If your first exposure to Mikkel was in the loss to Calzaghe, and you've only watched his work since then, I can certainly understand the bafflement of doubters who aren't sure what fans see in him, and why he is "rated so highly off a loss". His career didn't begin with a loss to Calzaghe, though. That was the swansong, the last performance to date of the very sharp, accurate (and IMO, prime) Kessler. Now that those attributes are faded, and at least for the time being he's got his plate full with top-level competition in front of him as far as the eye can see (assuming he KO's Green and makes the semifinals), he's got to make do with what he has in order to stand a chance. Phoning in performances like Perdomo won't cut it. Even this gutsy but sloppy effort against Froch - maintaining that level of performance simply isn't good enough going forward as the tournament heats up (or if he wants to remain a world champion in the longer term). He needs to look at what attributes he does still have available to him and improve upon them. That includes an iron will, near-iron chin, a still decent offensive arsenal (more varied than pre-Calzaghe, but at the expense of accuracy and fluidity...and his bread and butter 1-2 lacks the same snap that it had), a new trainer with new ideas, and a newfound go-for-broke slugger's mentality fueled by a burning desire to win. He can't outbox the true elite boxers at this point with his once-effective mastery of the stand-up European style (if he ever could have), so he has to be the aggressor...whether it looks pretty or not. He doesn't have the legs to utilize his old defensive evasiveness, nor are his reflexes sharp enough to pick off shots with his gloves...so Montoya is trying to drill home the concepts of head movement and being first (and last) to get off. His right hand the way he throws it now isn't going to be spoiling anybody's dreams anymore (except maybe tofu-chinned Allan Green's), so he's got to fine-tune his underrated hook and uppercut to the body and make sure he's putting the time in during camp to make sure he can maintain a very high punch output and bank on outworking and hopefully outlanding his opponents, maybe stopping them by attrition but at the very least racking up points. Whether a fan or not, you have to concede that it'll be interesting to see how he continues to fare with replacing his older, prettier, more careful and economical, and simpler style and skillset with the newer, uglier, riskier, busier and less familiar. Is your skepticism (and that of many, many others) of Kessler's current and recent ability at the world level justified and fair? Yes. Is yours - or anybody's - dismissal of him as ever having been a quality operator in the sport of boxing, and of his fans as fitting categorically into either the nationalist slot or the JC-fans-with-ulterior-motive slot - justified and fair? Not at all.
I think he lost personally. I just saw the fight for the first time earlier this week on Showtime on demand. Froch does have some skills. He was ducking Kesslers punches and picking some off as weel. When they showd the action in instant replays You could see just how subtle some of it was. Real time it looked as though the slipped and picked off shots were actually landing. I thought Froch won 115-113 . He does seem to have slipped a step but he still is a great fighter. Will he be sticking with his new trainer?
Kessler isnt getting the props he deservs because so many are so bias vs froch and class him as an overated bum