Jai Opetaia predicts he will “hurt” David Nyika and “put him to sleep” on Wednesday night in his headliner at the Gold Coast Convention Center, Broadbeach, Australia.
The wrath of Obadiah
IBF cruiserweight champion Opetaia (26-0, 20 KOs) went from 1 to 10 on the anger scale when talking about challenger Nyika (10-0, 9 KO) who has the nerve to say he wanted a “dog fight” on wednesday I don’t know why Opetaia bothers so much that Nyika believes he is going to win. The only conclusion I can come to is that he is insecure.
Opetaia was wild-eyed and it looked like her blood pressure was bubbling. If they had put a BP cuff on him, I would have expected him to be 180/120 in the danger level. You could tell he’s not used to his opponents wanting to go to war with him.
Most of them are so scared, but not Nyika. He saw a weakness in Opetaia, and he has the power, ring IQ, and 6’6″ size to take advantage of it.
Opetaia vs Nyika will be shown live on DAZN this Wednesday, January 8. This will be Jai’s fourth defense of the IBF cruiserweight title he won in 2022.
“Two years ago, I didn’t have a cracker, and now I’m packing stadiums. It’s crazy the journey I’ve been on,” said Jai Opetaia to The Land of Stompingtalking about how quickly it became popular.
“We just keep pushing forward. We don’t look back. Any of these guys who try to take us from the top, we have to put them in their place, and that’s what I want to do,” continued Opetaia. “I just want to fight. Knock me out. It’ll be the best sleep I’ve had in years since my surgery,” Jai said about Nyika with post-it notes, talking about his goal to knock him out.
“I expect a tough fight. He’s a good creative fighter, and he’s smart in that ring. He keeps talking about wanting a dogfight. what he comes out, is what we need to adapt”, said Opetaia.
It could be a tougher fight than Jai expects, and he will have to be 100% ready. Nyika has a plan to follow through using the pressure tactics and power punches that Mairis Briedis successfully used to give Opetaia pure hell in their rematch last year on May 18th. Jai would probably prefer to forget that fight, but Nyika. He uses it for study purposes and will try to duplicate and improve the success that the Latvian had.
The “Sleep” Guarantee.
“He’s a tall orthodox. He’s got a weird style about him, but he uses it well. We can cut him. I can f**** hurt this guy. He keeps talking about a dog fight, but if I hit him this guy, if he sleeps, it’s guaranteed. So, how much of a dog fight does Opetaia want?
Nyika could surprise Opetaia with his power and the dog he has in him because he will turn this fight into a full-scale war on Wednesday night. Opetaia is a bigger version of Dmitry Bivol, and he doesn’t like it when he has someone shooting at him. It’s good when he’s the one unloading with his bombs, but as soon as he comes back, he goes into his Bivol mode.
You can tell that Jai admires former WBA 175-lb champion Bivol, but his fighting style is very similar when under attack. Besides that, Opetaia is a different fighter because he is not a combination puncher like him. It focuses mainly on the load on the left hands.
We’ve seen that work well for Jai in his recent fights against Jack Massey, Ellis Zorro and Jordan Thompson. Neither of those guys are top level fighters in the true sense, so Opetaia dominated them only with his left hand.
Where he couldn’t top it was in his two fights with Mairis Briedis. He got lit up by the former champion and took a lot of punishment to the face. In the last fight, he didn’t look recognizable because Briedis hit him with some shots that turned him into a Halloween mask.
