Froch's Power Shows Frankie the Way to Go

Gone midnight in Nottingham. And young Frankie Gavin is standing about with his mates, other old pros, gym rats and a few straggling hacks in a hotel bar. We're talking about how easily the local boy Carl Froch put away the once estimable Robin Reid in five rounds a few hours previously at the nearby ice rink.

Amid the hubbub, the slim Birmingham lightweight from the Hall Green club is almost anonymously quiet. Occasionally, a stranger will come up and clasp his fists. Like nearly all fighters, his handshake is unusually gentle.

Gavin, if you haven't heard, is the first English boxer ever to win a gold medal at the world amateur championships. By so doing, he has qualified, along with three team-mates, for the Beijing Olympics in August. With him on Friday night, and introduced in the ring, is bronze medalist Joe Murray, who has come to cheer on his brother John. He wins again. Overnight, though, it is the amateurs who are the talk of the town.

With near uncommon self-effacement, Gavin accepts the compliments for his sublime boxing in the final in Chicago last weekend and the five bouts in the two weeks that preceded it. His friends are less reticent. They effuse about the southpaw's talent, his movement, reach, boxing brain and adaptability against a range of styles, how he will be a sensation when he turns professional after the Games.

And then, ever so shyly, Frankie takes a little green cloth bag from his pocket and pulls out the blue ribbon with a small, precious gold medal attached. He says nothing. He just shows you it and puts it away. Words can't describe the look on his face.

'He'll be better than Amir Khan,' they say. They could be right. All of that is some way off. His demeanor is so at odds with the dynamism of his boxing; you wonder where his fighting gift springs from. He is at the foothills of his career and anything is possible.

For Reid, the fighting business is finished after 14 years as a very good professional. He, too, was an outstanding amateur, an Olympic bronze medalist. Still proud, but 36 and no longer as resilient as in his prime, he will struggle to accept how Froch broke him down on Friday night.

He had whipped his body into decent shape, but his muscles were never in sync with his fading spirit.

He entered the ring first, sweated up and buzzing, the jeers of 'Who are ya?' giving way to the ear-splitting acclamation of Froch moments later. They bumped up against each other before the bell. Reid looked anxious, Froch cooler than cool.

From start to sorry finish, Froch's wickedly heavy jab and crunching right were the difference. Reid went down three times: in the second without a count from the referee Dave Parris; at the very end of the third and looking distressed; and, finally, in the fifth. Froch concluded the argument with a smashing right. Reid, once known as the Grim Reaper, stared a beating in the face and his knees automatically clicked as he knelt in submission. Mr Parris, who has seen it all before many times, was happy to accept the fighter's resignation at the end of the round.

It was not the way Reid, a former world champion who had mixed with the best, would have wanted to go out. He said later his right shoulder had 'gone'. But so had his ambition. Now it was about Froch. The heavy-handed, articulate outsider in the British fighting firmament (he will no doubt recover from being identified as 'Paul' in a national newspaper yesterday) paid tribute to a fellow pro afterwards, and then looked to the future.

Maybe, he said, to a showdown with Joe Calzaghe, who grabbed the nation's attention in Cardiff last weekend by seeing off the dangerous Dane Mikkel Kessler. However, Joe is going up to light-heavyweight and seems set for a big-money, big-noise fight in the United States with Bernard Hopkins in the New Year. 'I'll fight him at light-heavy,' Froch says. 'I'm ready. I'll fight Kessler. Whoever they want.'

I think Froch has as much talent as any fighter in Britain and the reason his CV doesn't glitter like those of Calzaghe or Clinton Woods is nobody wants to tangle with him unless pressed. They will not be able to ignore him for much longer.

And Frankie? He had better get used to people shaking those deceptively soft hands.