Smith looks uncertain here, watching Beterbiev for cues when to turn for the faceoff. Beterbiev looks so calm and alpha. Now I'm thinking Artur makes an early one-sided night of it, dammit!
You’re going to be surprised. This will end within four. Smith is a good guy so it won’t be nice to see, but he’s getting steamrolled here. The guys that have the best chance against Beterbiev are boxers like Gvozdyk and Bivol. If anyone wants to fight with Beterbiev and they don’t have elite defense at the same time, they’re easy work for Beterbiev.
Face offs don’t mean anything, and uncertainty might help Smith survive for a bit longer to give him more of a chance of landing his. I’d be more concerned if I was a Smith fan if he was looking confident.
I agree with your assessment, he's fought better competition than most with his number of fights. One thing I will disagree with is he did look hurt in the Callum Johnson fight when he was dropped. He did recover very quickly (reminded me a bit of Trinidad-Campas when Felix was dropped in that fight, recovered immediately and beat the hell out of camp as) and Johnson did nothing to follow it up (probably because he himself was taking a lot of punishment from Beterbiev already and was weary).
I think Beterbiev will win... But partly because of Artur's age, Smith is a live underdog and has a better chance than the oddsmakers believe.
My gut feeling has been Beterbiev via stoppage all along, similar to how he got Hot Rod out of there. I see Beterbiev mauling and wearing Smith down with his brutally heavy blows and wobbling and hurting him a bunch of times culminating with the ref or Smith's corner rescuing Smith after a series of brain rattling clumps round the noggin have hurt him again. That's the imagery I keep seeing flash through my mind when I think about how it'll play out and that's how it should go down on paper because Beterbiev is the much better fighter. But Beterbiev's age and loss of a step or two certainly evens it up somewhat in Smith's favour who many still continue to underrate. If Smith catches him with a huge right hand bomb over the top or big left hook, especially in between shots when Beterbiev's attacking and leaves himself open, and jumps on a hurt Beterbiev I won't be shocked if he managed to pull off a huge upset and if he did whilst I would be gutted for Beterbiev I would also be genuinely pleased for Smith and it would be a real Cinderella story if he was able to do so.
