by Samuel Lee
British super-middleweight great of the 90s, Chris Eubank, gives his verdicts on the recent Carl Froch vs George Groves all-British super-middleweight world title fight.
He believes Froch underestimated the threat of Groves, ‘I made the same mistake many times, for example against Michael Watson in our second fight when he fought way beyond what we had seen from him before, and against Joe Calzaghe when he fought way beyond what his experience and record would’ve suggested.
‘No doubt, Carl underestimated George.’
Eubank felt Froch had his measure early on, before a complacent mistake. ‘The first round was a battle of the jabs, kind of like when me and Mark Breland fought on New York TV in the amateurs, with Froch edging the better of it with his reach, angle and step back out of range.’ And then the knockdown… ‘Froch made an amateurish mistake on his part, as he would acknowledge. It’s very ungamely for your back foot to be placed in front of your front foot with your chin up for grabs, and George detected it and just got him with a nice right.
‘You pay the price for such mistakes at that level.’
From there, Eubank feels the fight was Groves’. ‘After that first round, Groves out-boxed, out-fought, out-thought, out-maneuvered and even out-strengthed Carl for most of the rest of the fight.
‘In regards to the stoppage, it was something diabolic. If that was me, I’d have wanted to rip the referees head off. And if that was me, I’d much rather have been knocked unconscious and hospitalized than cheated untruthfully.
‘Boxing is not for the squirmish, we go in and we know we could die. We still go in. It’s our choice and it’s our living, our business, our way of life, our sacrifice. It was vastly wrong, what the referee did, because who’s to say Groves wouldn’t have found a fight-ending punch of his own – we’ve seen it throughout history. You never know, and now we’ll never know!’
