Forget Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao, the boxing event of 2014 takes place in London tonight.

Carl Froch puts his IBF and WBA Super Middleweight straps on the line against bitter rival George Groves in a fight that will be watched live by 80,000 people at Wembley. Yes, 80,000 people. At a boxing match.

A Mayweather fight might pack some serious punch in with the pay-per-view sales, but only 15,718 showed up to watch him out-point Marcos Maidana earlier this month.

And there’s a good reason HBO have picked it up for live afternoon screening in the US, an honour seldom bestowed upon all-British bouts.

It is of course a rematch, and seemingly everyone has a different opinion on how it will unfold. It really is that hard to call.

Last November Groves dropped Froch in the first round, dragged him to hell and back for the next six, before a resurgent champion rallied to stop the younger man in the ninth session.

In what was an absurdly premature stoppage referee Howard Foster managed in that split second to end his own career as a top official and spawn the biggest rivalry British boxing has seen since Chris Eubank and Nigel Benn waged war in the early 1990s.

Nothing sells in boxing like bad blood and the hostility here is genuine. It’s not the usual sales-oriented pre-fight jibes – it is clear they detest one another.

Unlike most match-ups where the violence and shared suffering engenders a bond, you get the impression Froch and Groves will never share a crumb of affection.

As well as all of that, it is a fight with many other intriguing themes. It’s the youthful upstart versus grizzled, salty, battle-hardened veteran. It’s Groves, cerebral, the thinking man’s fighter versus the warrior Froch, a fighter’s fighter, for whom it seems machismo is his oxygen.

And it’s all amplified by that uncertainty from the first fight. Is the 36-year-old Froch’s career now terminally in decline, or will a more motivated man be able to reproduce the type of performance that saw him annihilate Lucian Bute and outlast Mikel Kessler?

And did we see the best of George Groves or can he improve again, cope better when hurt and this time conserve some energy for the championship rounds?

All of us, including a British record crowd for a boxing match, will find out tonight.