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Carl Froch hopes that the latest Misfits Boxing card is the beginning of the end.
Despite a pair of intriguing main event bouts and an undercard loaded with social media standouts, this past Saturday’s Prime Card failed to deliver in the end with the top-two bouts, Tommy Fury vs. KSI and Logan Paul vs. Dillon Danis, playing out in grim fashion.
While Paul’s chaotic fight with Danis at least generated a few amusing headlines, Fury’s listless decision win over KSI failed to generate any sort of fireworks. Froch, a former boxing champion currently serving as an analyst for Sky Sports, was appalled by Saturday’s main event and the influencer boxing trend in general.
“The fight itself was absolutely f****** diabolical,” Froch said on his Froch on Fighting YouTube channel. “It was so bad. It was crap. It was probably the worst fight I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t competitive. Neither of them really wanted to throw a punch for fear of getting hit back. I suppose KSI tried a little bit, but I don’t know what he was doing. He was kind of bouncing on the floor, doing star jumps in the middle of the ring in front of Tommy Fury, just waiting and just doing these star jumps, waving his arms around, flapping around like what? It wasn’t boxing. He was trying to time Tommy on the way in with a 1-2. Every now and again KSI landed one punch, probably one or two punches through the whole six poxy rounds. … Tommy Fury just stood there looking at him trying to back him up. There were no feints, there was no footwork, there was no head movement. All that happened was KSI potshotted, sometimes he landed, sometimes he didn’t, and then they came together for a hugfest. They were just hugging each other.”
“It’s cringy to watch,” Froch continued. “What are these two guys doing? It’s so bad. It’s appalling. Everyone who’s seen it will agree, I think all the response on YouTube comments or on Instagram reels that have gone out, everybody agrees how s*** it was. And then they’ve got the audacity at the end to have an argument, to say ‘Oh look, you’ve got a mark on your face.’ ‘I hit you more than you hit me.’ ‘You were trying to hit me with a jab.’ The argument and the end was like-You’ve just had six rounds, 18 minutes of trying to hit each other and all you did was kind of run and then when you got in range, you stood and held each other, now you wanna have a f****** argument about who’s hit who and who’s won? I don’t think anybody should’ve won, it should’ve been a draw.”
As abysmal as the in-ring action was, the joint Misfits Boxing-DAZN production at least impressed on the production side, with the larger-than-life personalities all doing their best to top one another in the lead-up to fight night and at the event itself.
Even Froch had to tip his cap to the influencer boxers’ ability to capture the attention of their target audience.
“It was a great production,” Froch said. “The venue in Manchester was absolutely packed, sold out. KSI, when he did his ring walk came in in his green Lamborghini, so you can see why it’s appealing to a lot of young kids. A lot of kids, my son’s friends from school, they got around in, like, 10s and 12s of them to sit and watch the event. They were all sitting there with a popcorn and chips and burgers from the local takeaway and they’re all sitting there getting excited for this event.
“So in terms of the production, the pyrotechnics on the night, the ring entrances, the celebrity presence, the crowd presence, the money that must have gone into it, I think they spent a lot of dough on it to make it look good. It’s all glitz and glam.”
Still, without the action to back it up, Froch can’t imagine why fans would continue to shell out their hard-earned money to watch untrained boxers put on boring fights. The Prime Card unquestionably drew massive interest from a non-traditional combat sports crowd, but has influencer boxing seen its peak?
“I hope it’s going nowhere and I hope it’s hit a brick wall and that’s going to be the last we ever have to see of this Misfits Boxing absolute crap. … When people are paying money for a main event, they want to see a boxing fight or they want to see some kind of show,” Froch said. “The Logan Paul fight was crap and the Tommy Fury-KSI fight was absolutely diabolical, it was awful.”
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