Quote Originally Posted by Rantcatrat View Post
This is a corker of a fight. In terms of big even-$ fights this year, Bute-Pascal is up there with all of them - Donaire-Rigo, Kessler-Froch II, and Canelo-Trout. If we are talking about boxing ability, I tend to side with Bute. He can be a master boxer when's he on. The problem is it's hard to get over his performance in the Froch fight.

In his next fight he also somewhat struggled with what appeared to be a limited Grachev. Grachev gave him a rough go of it. However, he went on to upset Erdei in his next fight, and he has knocked out Sillakh, which makes me think that he's a tougher than advertised. In the last few rounds, Bute was beating him up, something that Erdei couldn't do. Could it be that Bute found his pre-Froch form in those last few rounds?
Yea it was a pretty solid fight. The ref was WAY to involved for my liking. He broke the action of the fight tremendously.... it could have been an all-time classic if the ref had stayed the fuck out of the fight!!!

That and for the fact that Pascal was causing the clenches more than Froch...in fact, that head bending and clenching caused him to look sloppy and for him to lose more of the rounds than he shouldn't have.

The scores are a bit misleading to how close the fight really was. Froch just had more class, it wasn't a white-wash beating ala RJJ vs. any of the LH tin cans he faced in the late 90's early 00's.