Prime Joe Calzaghe vs Beterbiev

What did Calzaghe do at 175? Sneaked past Hopkins and beat a shot to bits Roy Jones?

 

1. Calzaghe is a career Super Middle Weight with two fights at Light Heavy, both against shot old fighters.
2. Calzaghe was dropped early, often by short punches.
3. Beterbiev hits harder than anyone Calzaghe has ever faced.

His being undefeated has no significance in this thread as he never faced a fighter the calibre of Beterbiev. Calzaghe kept people where wanted them with a great work rate, flurries and crisp one off punches. None of this would be effective against a healthy natural light heavyweight like Beterbiev.

Calzaghe may be elusive, but he will eventually get hit. That is simply unavoidable. Beterbiev is an underrated boxer who even gave Usyk problems when they fought and Usyk is a master level boxer.

Beterbiev throws short hard punches and would catch Joe eventually. His clubbing shots would do Joe harm even as glancing blows. I see Calzaghe winning the first six or seven rounds and then getting obliterated and I am a Calzaghe fan.

 

Got knocked down in the first round in both fights too

But he's surviving and beating Beterbiev

 

Makes it even funnier then that Calzaghe has the best single win out of the two of them even thoughts he's only fought twice at LHW pahahaha

 

Whilst himself pretty old at 36 and bordering on shot too...

The most you can read into these, I think, is that we have no real idea how a prime Zags might have coped with competitive fighters at LHW.


Your logic is pretty solid for the most part IMHO, but there are two things that give me pause:
1) We're pretty much at the peak of a hype wave for Beterbiev.
2) Calzaghe is a bonafide ATG - Beterbiev is only a potential ATG at this point (and in boxing, fighters can go from "potential ATG" to "overrated hypejob" in a few short fights).

In reality I just don't think I'd want to call it - Beterbiev looks good at the moment and as you say he's a natural LHW... But Zags was extremely skilled and there's potential for it to be a fight where some smartass will never let you forget that they told you "there's levels to this" beforehand.

 

Against two shot fighters WAY past their prime?


Yeah, Calslappy is an ATG at 175lbs

 

would have been very interesting to watch, my gut says that Beterbiev too strong and Calzaghe unproven at 175, but Calzaghe was strong in every area and much faster

 

So did Ottke and Ward.

 

Hopkins was hardly shot you complete bellend...

 

What "shot" B-Hop that went on to reign for many more years ?

And still took your boys best win 8 rounds at 50 years old LOL

 

It was before he went on his miracle diet under Mackie Shiltone.

 

Thanks for your analysis. I am not going to analyze how Beterbiev vs Calzaghe is gonna play out since what I am focussing now is Bivol vs Beterbiev. That's what the fight that I'm looking forward to watching it soon.

 

Calzaghe win over Hopkins aged well.. The fight was atrocious down to Hopkins negativity and Calzaghes hand issues .. but ultimately he made Hopkins feign every trick in the book otherwise he'd have had to quit ,

 

Joe gets a wide points decision after maybe one or two scares a long the way but in the end a fairly easy nights works for the Italian Dragon.