TAVORIS CLOUD vs GLEN JOHNSON

It’s youth versus experience in what should be a bruising battle on HBO this Saturday when Tavoris Cloud defends his IBF light-heavy title against the always-tough Glen Johnson in St. Louis.
 
Cloud is young, strong and unbeaten, and he’s the favourite. Johnson is 41 — the older man by 13 years — but he looked just as grindingly efficient as ever when overpowering Yusaf Mack in six rounds in his last fight.
 
Johnson’s trainer, Orlando Cuellar, tells me that Cloud has “the style for Glen to pound”. Cuellar feels that Johnson’s far greater seasoning will make the difference. “Everything Tavoris brings, we’ve seen before,” he said.  “Glen will set a lot of traps for him. We’re very optimistic.”
 
In the Cloud camp, trainer Al Bonanni told me from training camp in Florida: “If Johnson wants to go for the gusto he gets knocked out or gets physically hurt throughout the fight; if he fights defensively and uses his intelligence it could be a distance fight, but he’ll have to use all his guile.”
 
Cloud has had only 20 fights and his inexperience showed in his title-winning fight with Clinton Woods last August, when he was eating jabs from the tall British boxer and took far too many punches for comfort. It was the veteran Woods who looked stronger at the end, winning the last two rounds on two judges’ cards. Still, it was a clear win for Cloud, 116-112 on all cards.
 
Johnson, of course, fought Woods three times in the U.K., coming out 1-1-1, a draw, a win and a defeat, although not surprisingly he feels that he won all three bouts. “Johnson never dominated Woods the way that Cloud did,” Al Bonanni said when we talked over the phone.
 
Bonanni feels that Woods’s height and jab made it such a hard fight for Cloud. He points out that Johnson isn’t as tall as Woods and doesn’t have the same sort of long, punishing jab. Johnson, he feels, is a better opponent for Cloud to look against. “This will be an easier fight than the Woods fight,” he assured me.
 
Cloud’s defence — or lack of it — was a worry against Woods, and Bonanni has been working on making improvements, slipping the jab and so on, but correctly points out that his fighter’s offense is his best defence. Cloud is a very aggressive fighter with good hand speed. He almost overpowered Woods with a huge onslaught in the eighth round and he hurt him again in the 10^th.
 
 
Even though Cloud was tired in the last two rounds and had blood inside the mouth he still threw some heavy shots. It was by far Cloud’s toughest fight and he came through the ordeal. Sometimes, a comparatively inexperienced fighter can improve from a fight such as this. Cloud got the title on grit, workrate and desire. Now, in his first defence, he can perhaps give a more settled type of performance, not burning up quite as much energy in the earlier rounds, paying a bit more attention to blocking and ducking rather than going all-out to smash his way through the other fighter.
 
Johnson is going to be taking the fight to Cloud and trying to wear him down. The durable old warrior will be catching punches on his high guard as he marches forward, then digging in the hurtful hooks, uppercuts and right hands on the inside, going to the body, seeking to deny Cloud the room to trigger off his eye-catching combinations.
 
Cloud, though, has the youthful zest to keep firing back, cancelling out Johnson’s successes with the sort of barrages that broke down the veteran Julio Cesar Gonzalez in 10 rounds and piled up points against Woods. One would hope to see some technical improvements from Cloud, but in the end it might come down to which man can win a war of attrition, and the younger, fresher Cloud might be the better placed to do this.

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