CARL FROCH W12 (split) ANDRE DIRRELL

There have been far worse decisions than the one that saw Carl Froch hang on to his WBC super middleweight title with a split decision win over Andre Dirrell in the second of the “Super Six” tournament’s first-stage bouts on Saturday night. Earlier in the evening, Arthur Abraham left no room for doubt with a dominant performance ending in a spectacular last-seconds knockout win over Jermain Taylor in Berlin.

I was in the minority in picking a Dirrell upset win and I know I am in the minority again when I offer the opinion that Froch did enough to scrape home on points.

If this was a boxing match scored by the electronic system used in the Olympics, I have no doubt that Dirrell would have got the verdict. He almost certainly landed more clean punches on target than did Froch.

OK, so why wasn’t it Dirrell getting his arm raised at the end of the bout?

This is where it gets a bit tricky.

There were several rounds, as I saw it, that were open to doubt. That is, a judge could have scored these rounds in either boxer’s favour and not necessarily been wrong.

Dirrell was just as fast as anticipated. The young man from Flint, MI, was clever and intelligent and he showed some grit when rallying in the last three rounds — rounds that one would have expected the more experienced Froch to be dominating. The 10th and 11th were, I thought, Dirrell’s two strongest rounds, with the harsh deduction of a point seeming to spur him on rather than disheartening him.

Unfortunately, Dirrell was his own worst enemy. There were flashes of evasive brilliance, but at other times Dirrell seemed to be in full flight, reminding me a bit of Oscar De La Hoya’s backpedalling down the stretch that cost him the decision against Felix Trinidad. At other times Dirrell would almost jump into clinches, and he complained to the referee a little too often about being roughed up. (What happened to the days when fighters would fight and leave the refereeing to the referee?)

All of the above was surely giving the judges a negative impression of Dirrell’s performance. This impression would no doubt have been reinforced by the frequent cautions that referee Hector Afu, of Panama, issued to Dirrell for holding Froch or leaning on him in the clinches.

Then we come to Froch. The British fighter looked crude at times, and he threw some wild misses, but he was pressing ahead constantly and he gave the impression that, at all times, he wanted to fight. Dirrell, meanwhile, was presenting an image — for much of the fight — of a boxer who was trying to avoid contact, spoil, and steal rounds.

Froch was fighting like the man who was in command of the fight. Professional judges take note of that.

I’m thinking back to the famous heavyweight fight between Muhammad Ali and Jimmy Young in 1976. The unanimous decision in Ali’s favour was roundly criticised, as I recall. Young seemed, in the opinion of the crowd and most of the American TV viewers, to have outscored Ali. Everyone agrees that Ali looked dreadful in that fight but Young was excessively cautious in most of the early rounds and on several occasions — perhaps as many as six times — ducked his head through the ropes to avoid punches.

I think that in this fight it wasn’t so much that the judges were giving the rounds to Ali as not giving the rounds to Young.

This is what I think happened in the Froch-Dirrell fight. I suspect that there were several rounds where the two judges who had Froch winning felt that they couldn’t bring themselves to give rounds to a challenger who had been unassertive. No, this has nothing to do with the fallacy that a challenger has to beat a champion clearly to win the title: when two boxers are in the ring it is just a matter of the judges deciding which of them won or lost each round. A judge does not sit down to score a fight thinking that the champion has a built-in advantage simply because he holds the title — you’ll have to trust me on this.

Dirrell would most likely have won the decision had he fought a couple more rounds the way he did the 10th and 11th, but some credit has to be given to Froch for forcing the challenger to box cautiously — there was a reason why the American boxer didn’t want to take chances.

I did think that the referee was extremely harsh in taking the point from Dirrell for leaning on Froch. There were infringements on both sides here. Froch was manhandling Dirrell, hitting him behind the head and on the break, and he surely should have had a point taken for tossing Dirrell to the floor, just as Marco Antonio Barrera was docked a point for running Naseem Hamed’s head into the ring-post cushion in Las Vegas, or as Hamed was penalised for body-slamming Cesar Soto to the canvas in Detroit — Dirrell could have suffered an injury when he was thrown over, and then we would have been looking at big-fight fiasco. The ref seemed, to me, to be favouring Froch.

Maybe the Nottingham crowd had some effect on the way the fight was judged, with roars even when the hometown favourite was missing with his big hooks and right hands, but this is why home advantage can be crucial in a close fight. The American camp knew this going in. The challenger’s trainer and grandfather Leon Lawson got it right when he told Dirrell to go for the stoppage in the 12th: “We ain’t getting a decision here.”

If the fight had been in, say, Las Vegas, or the Mohegan Sun, or another U.S.venue, Dirrell might well have left the ring as the new champion. Froch got the breaks on Saturday, Dirrell didn’t. As American real-estate agents impress upon their clients: “Location, location, location.”

In the Showtime coverage, which was my vehicle for viewing the fight, analyst Al Bernstein had Dirrell edging it but didn’t seem too sure. In the British broadcast, commentator John Rawling of the new PPV platform Primetime had Dirrell winning (I know this because he sent me an email to this effect after the fight), while I’m told that ex-fighter analyst Jon Thaxton also scored it for Dirrell while pundit Steve Bunce went for Froch.

That’s the sort of fight it was — open to interpretation.