But with Hopkins now 36-25 ahead, I wouldn’t expect the consensus to change that much.

As I said in the original post, this isn’t about right or wrong. You are perfectly entitled to think Dawson would be too young and hungry for Hopkins, just as I believe Hopkins is too experienced and nasty for Dawson.

Let’s put it this way, I would rather fight Dawson than Hopkins, simply because Dawson doesn’t offer anything you won’t get from a million other fighters in a million gyms across the world. OK, he is better at it than almost anyone in his weight class (some would argue that the ‘almost’ is redundant in that sentence), is more durable, hits harder, etc etc, but I wouldn’t honestly know where to start if I was fighting Hopkins. I’d know that to beat Dawson, you have to fight going sideways, moving to his right to put him in positions he doesn’t throw well from.

Dawson fights best when he is fighting people who move in straight lines (Adamek, Johnson, although I thought he lsot the fight with Johnson), and who give him that extra bit of time (making instinct/anticipation less of a prerequisite) to line up his shots. Hopkins would not allow him this, and would also not require it himself, as he can punch off the back foot, the front foot, can make shapes Dawson has never seen before, and is seemingly indestructible.

I’m not saying,or implying, for one minute that I could beat Chad Dawson, but at least I’d have some idea of where to start. With Hopkins, how do you predict what he is gonna do? How do you formulate a gameplan that will be effective? Pavlik’s gameplan was to force Hopkins onto the back foot. Pavlik justifiably assumed that he would be on a seek-and-destroy mission, chasing Hopkins down and throwing at will until ‘Nard tied him up. Hopkins, unpredictably, crazily, and brilliantly, decided (well, Nazim Richardson probably decided) to fight the whole fight going forwards, beating Pavlik to the punch, forcing Pavlik to fight in a way he couldn’t handle. Pavlik has never been a back foot fighter, and Hopkins showed what a good, well executed gameplan can do.

I know Dawson at 175 is a different proposition to Pavlik at 170, but I think Hopkins would find a similar weakness in Dawson, and would exploit it mercilessly.

To look at it another way, just for a second, although this is the bit where I can be accused of stupidity and maybe even bias, I think Dawson lost 3 fights ago to Johnson. I also believe that Hopkins won the fight with Calzaghe (my card 114-113 Hopkins), and the first fight with Taylor (I had the second one a draw).

Taking my own personal views on these fights into consideration, I have never seen Bernard Hopkins in a fight I thought he lost (although had Eastman actually come to fight, I thought he could/should have beaten Hopkins that night, Hopkins was out of sorts,looked slow and lethargic, and Eastman seemed reluctant to let his hands go).

I have watched 4 Chad Dawson fights, and think he lost one of them.

I know I’m not a judge, and I’m not any sort of ‘real’ authority, and I could well be wrong or even just in the minority, but I would be less than reasoned if I didn’t take my own views on prior fights into consideration when discussing a potential/hypothetical match-up.