Britains Top 10 Super Middleweights of last 25 years

First topic message reminder :

This is my firsy topic on this board (and its probably been done before im guessing!)so go easy haha. But in light of Saturdays fight i'll give you my top 10 and hopefully we'll get a few of yours  

1. Calazaghe
2. Eubank
3. Froch
4. Benn
5. Collins
6. Watson
7. Reid
8. Groves
9. Woodhall
10. Piper

I think De Gale has the potential to get on the list and Groves can climb the list. I was a bit unsure where to rank Watson but have gone with 6.
I have included Collins even though he is from ROI i think - as he was very much part of the British scene.

What are your top 10's?

DAVE667 wrote:
There are a few posters on here who could follow suit...and Thomas Hauser might want to pay attention before inflicting his latest biography of Muhammed Ali on us

Bit harsh Dave last time I looked on Amazon there are only around 400 on the market about him. Am sure there are some angles not covered in them, surely there is a Muhammad Ali's favourite cheeses book just waiting to be written.

I want to see Ward in 12 hard rounds before I'd give a confident prediction on him vs Calzaghe because he coasts quite alot in fights. Whether thats down to his stamina or out of choice is unanswered for the moment. As for Calzaghe ducking Froch - That's like Wlad ducking Joshua. He's not really ducking, hes bent over double and laughing raucously. Froch has nothing in his arsenal to beat joe - Doesnt punch hard enough, doesnt box well enough, cant match him for speed and cant match him for brain and That version of froch wasn't as good as he is/was in recent fights.

All glib stuff so why didn't he just fight him?

Because he had two or three fights left and wanted big money fights, and preferably at light heavy so he could have the claim of being a two division world champion. If Kell Brook called out Mayweather tomorrow and Floyd had two more fights and retired would Floyd have ducked him?

Because he earned quite a lot more money fighting someone else, who was quite a bit better than froch.

Rowley wrote:Because he had two or three fights left and wanted big money fights, and preferably at light heavy so he could have the claim of being a two division world champion. If Kell Brook called out Mayweather tomorrow and Floyd had two more fights and retired would Floyd have ducked him?

I thought it was because he didn't like him and didn't want to give him a payday.

Rowley wrote:Because he had two or three fights left and wanted big money fights, and preferably at light heavy so he could have the claim of being a two division world champion. If Kell Brook called out Mayweather tomorrow and Floyd had two more fights and retired would Floyd have ducked him?

Haz and Tophat would think so..

ShahenshahG wrote:Because he earned quite a lot more money fighting someone else, who was  quite a bit better than froch.

Roy's shell better than Froch?  Pull the other one mate.

He vacated and then fought Hopkins - who definately is better than Froch - and might even beat him now.

Yeah I'll admit, as good a boxer as he was, when it comes to the art of manipulation, there was no one to touch him.

Calzaghe was a class act but he should have been chasing the big fights state side well before he did.

Joe had the talent to hold his own with anyone instead of staying in Britain with that bloody awful WBO belt.

But he was stuck with Warren and that isn't Warren's way.

Looking back now on Calzaghe's ability he really was the best talent that the UK has produced in the last 30 years.  Lennox has greater achievements but Calzaghe was a better talent in my view.

Calzaghe still number one, for me. Froch has been solidified as his nearest challenger for a while now - I think there is daylight between Carl and the likes of Benn and Eubank.

Forgetting Calzaghe's win over Hopkins, the gap between him and Carl at 168 is pretty small. The best win either man has as a Super-Middle is Joe's victory over a peak, unbeaten Kessler in 2007. A six years older and slightly shopworn (but still very much a live and classy operator) Kessler is arguably Froch's best victory, which puts Calzaghe's win over him in to context. Even more so when you consider that Froch couldn't get the job done the first time he took Kessler on.

That said, outside of Kessler, I think there's a good argument to be made that Carl's list of victims reads a shade better than Joe's.

I've argued before that the fact that Froch has taken these men on in such a short space of time compared to the decade-long reign of Calzaghe perhaps gives the impression that he's faced more good quality fighters than Calzaghe, when in reality it just appears that way because he boxed them in relatively quick succession, but nevertheless I think Pascal, Taylor, Dirrell, Abraham, Johnson, Bute and Groves on Froch's ledger gets a thumbs up compared to Calzaghe's, which offers Eubank, Reid, Woodhall, Brewer, Mitchell, Lacy and Bika, particularly if we take in to account the respective conditions of those men when the fights took place.

A big stumbling block, however, is that Calzaghe has been the consensus champion at 168, whereas Froch's hasn't. For sure, if you're a Froch die-hard, you could argue that this is merely down to the luck of the draw, and that Joe wouldn't have ever been top man either if he had to face a fighter of Ward's calibre a few years back. Conversely, you could argue that Froch may well have made the Ring belt his own had he been around in any other time apart from this one. Would Calzaghe have been able to beat Ward? Right now I'd lean towards Ward, but not with a massive degree of confidence or conviction.

However, one thing that I am absolutely positive of is that, had Calzaghe ever boxed Ward, he wouldn't have been thoroughly dominated, outclassed and made to look pretty ordinary the way Froch was back in December 2011, whatever the result of the fight was.

To me, that swings it back in Calzaghe's favour for the time being, although as I said I do think the gap between them as 168 pounders is relatively narrow. While Carl's record and list of victims perhaps has a bit more depth than Joe's, I can't ignore the fact that Calzaghe scaled the single highest height than either of them has managed, that he eventually established himself as the undisputed king of the weight class and that his weaknesses (which he has fewer of than Froch) were never highlighted as harshly and with as much frequency as Froch's have been every now and then over the past few years.

The fact that Froch, in spite of those weaknesses, has achieved all he has simply makes his career all the more meritorious and impressive, but I'd still feel comfortable making Calzaghe the finest Super-Middleweight to ever come from these shores.