Journeyman Dillian Whyte invented the winning strategy for “The Gypsy King” Tyson Fury to dethrone unified heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk on December 21.
According to Whyte, Fury’s strategy for beating Usyk boils down to using the same roughhouse tactics he used to defeat former cruiserweight champion Steve Cunningham 11 years ago in 2013. In that fight, the then 25-year-old. Fury did a lot of holding, leaning and throwing clubbing shots.
Dirty tactics don’t work
To score the knockout, Fury held Cunningham in place with his left forearm, pinned him to the ropes and then nailed him with a right hand. The referee should not have stopped the fight because it was a highly illegal and obvious move.
“Usyk showed some things in the last fight that he only showed in the amateurs. He never showed in the professionals,” said Dillian Whyte to the talkSport Boxing channelRevealing how little he knows about Oleksandr Usyk’s career with his narrow view of how he fights.
“I still think Fury can beat him. He’s the bigger man and has the size advantage. Il doit le combattre comme il a combatte Steve Cunningham. That’s how he needs to fight Usyk. Be nasty and do good,” Whyte said.
Dillian doesn’t say who Cunningham was over the mountainhaving lost three of his last four fights going into the fight with Fury. In other words, Cunningham was nowhere near the level that Usyk is now and fought a poor fight, allowing Fury to hold and lean on him all night instead of pushing him hard to prevent him from using his weight to use . Usyk did not allow Fury to use his tilt.
When Tyson tried to hold on, Usyk kicked him with all his might, sending the giant backwards. You could see from those shoves that Usyk was more powerful than him, which is strange because he was so much lighter.
Fury has weak upper body strength. His weight is centered around his midsection and his legs similar to a basketball player. In terms of upper body strength, Fury has the strength of a lightweight, not a powerhouse. Artur Beterbiev is a bigger puncher than Fury, and he’s fighting at 175.
The basic problem that Fury has in using the same game plan that he employed against a Cunningham over the hill is that Usyk does not allow him to stay thin. Also, there is zero chance that Fury can use an illegal forearm to hold Usyk still and then hit him with a right hand.
This tactic won’t work against Usyk because he won’t fight with his back against the ropes like Cunningham stupidly did in their fight on April 20, 2013.
Age of Fury shows
Another problem facing Fury is that he is much older than when he fought Cunningham. That fight took place before Fury fought Wladimir Klitschko; then he was lighter on his feet. He was a completely different fighter than the 50 year old heavyweight he is today.
The years have been hard for Fury, and he’s aging fast. Some people age slowly, but in the case of Fury, he is physically nothing close to the person he was in his mid-20s. As such, the game plan that Whyte wants Fury to use against Usyk is physically impossible.
The only way it has a chance to work is for Usyk to lay with his back against the ropes and allow Fury to hold him in place to line up for a right hand. That is not going to happen.
Fury’s best chance to win is to stay in the center of the ring and try to hit Usyk with an uppercut to the head or a body shot. It is common knowledge that Usyk’s kryptonite has been hitting the body. We saw that in his fight with Daniel Dubois when Usyk was dropped by a body shot in the fifth round of their fight on August 26, 2023.
The referee declared it a low blow, but replays showed it was on the waist. If Fury wants to win, he needs to focus on going to the body, not trying to illegally hold Usyk in place with a forearm and clubbing him with a free hand like he did against Cunningham.
