IBF cruiserweight champion Jai Opetaia expects challenger David Nyika to be cagey because he won’t want to get hit when they meet in their 12-round headliner this Wednesday, January 8 at the Gold Coast Convention Center, Broadbeach, Australia. The event will be shown live on DAZN.
Opetaia (26-0, 20 KOs) sparred with the undefeated no. 10 IBF-rated Nyika (10-0, 9 KOs), and feels that he did not want to taste his power. He thinks it will hurt Nyika if he connects with something.
Freeze Combat
Opetaia is believed to have looked past Nyika towards a potential fight against unified heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk, which promoter Eddie Hearn has been talking about. He is also interested in a unification fight with WBA and WBO cruiserweight champion Gilberto ‘Zurdo’ Ramirez.
Nyika saw what Mairis Briedis he did to the left-handed Opetaia in his rematch last year and knows he cracks under pressure. He can’t handle it when he starts taking the punishment, so he gets on his bike and does everything to avoid getting hit.
All Opetaia’s mystique disappeared in the second half of his rematch with the 39-year-old Briedis on May 18. He could not cope with the pressure that the former champion put on him.
I wonder what Turki Al-Shiekh thought when he saw Opetaia. It looked like a classic example of a soldier in combat freeze. Opetaia seemed shut down, frozen, and mentally paralyzed by the pressure Briedis was putting on him. Turki had seen what I saw. Opetaia looked like a complete mess. He appeared broken at the end of that fight.
“I’m happy with all the support. They support me because I keep winning fights. I keep doing it,” Jai Opetaia told Jai McAllister’s YouTube channel, talking about Turki Al-Shiekh who supports him. “The pressure is on, let’s do it. Like I said, ‘It’s do or die.’
“I don’t know. I’m curious to see how he comes out, how aggressive he comes out,” Opetaia said when asked how his fight with Nyika will play out. “I know he doesn’t want to hit me, because I know if I hit him, he’s going to get hurt. It’s going to be a chess match. We’ll see how it goes.”
Exploit the weakness
Opetaia, 29 years old, has been supported now, but everything could end if Nyika teaches him to Planet 9, like Neptune, in the outer solar system with some of the big shots that will land.
“I never aim lower than the top, and Jai is the man now,” said Nyika Jai McAllister. “Toward the end of the time I was sparring with him, I got the better of him. We made the executive decision to stop working with him because we had all the intelligence we needed.”
Nyika seems to have figured out Opetaia towards the end of their spars and probably figured out the key to beating him. It’s pretty obvious. He doesn’t deal well with pressure, and his resume is pretty barren of quality opposition. He only fought one good guy, Briedis, and that was at the end of his career. A younger version of Briedis would have been a nightmare for Opetaia.
“I think he’s trying to blow everybody out of the water, and he’s done a pretty good job. I’ve seen the guys he’s beaten, and none of them really had solid or sound game plans,” Nyika said. on many of the soft boys that Opetaia beat.
Quality of enemies
It was pretty easy for Opetaia to score a KO because he hasn’t beaten quality opposition during his career, apart from his two fights against Briedis.
Opetaia’s best opponents:
– Mairis Briedis
– Jack Massey
– Ellis Zorro
– Jordan Thompson
– Mark Flanagan
Those are not great fighters. The only one you can say is good was Briedis, but he was past his best years at 39. Any fighter can look good when they go up against the type of opposition Opetaia has fought his entire 10-year professional career.
