IBF cruiserweight champion Jai Opetaia expects challenger David Nyika to be cagey as he won’t want to be bumped when they meet in their 12-round headliner this Wednesday, January 8, at the Gold Coast Convention Centre, Broadbeach, Australia . The event will be shown live on DAZN.
Opetaia (26-0, 20 KOs) has sparred with the undefeated #10 IBF-rated Nyika (10-0, 9 KOs), and he feels he won’t want to test his strength. He thinks he will hurt Nyika if he connects with something.
Fight freezing
Opetaia is believed to have looked past Nyika to 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 did to the southpaw Opetaia in their rematch last year and knows he breaks under pressure. He can’t handle it when he starts taking punishment, so he gets on his bike and does anything to avoid getting hit.
Opetaia’s entire mystique disappeared in the second half of his reunion with the 39-year-old Briedis on May 18. He couldn’t handle the pressure the former champion put on him.
I wonder what Turki Al-Shiekh thought when he watched Opetaia. It looked like a classic example of a soldier in battle freezes. Opetaia seemed locked up, frozen and mentally paralyzed from the pressure Briedis was putting on him. Turki must have seen what I saw. Opetaia looked like a complete mess. He looked broken at the end of that fight.
“I am happy with all the support. They support me because I keep winning fights. I keep performing,” Jai Opetaia told Jai McAllister’s YouTube channel, talking about Turki Al-Shiekh supporting 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 go. “I know he doesn’t want to get hit because I know if I hit him, he’s going to get hurt. It’s going to be a chess match. Let’s see how he goes.”
Exploitation of weakness
Opetaia (29) is backed up now, but it could all end if Nyika pushes him to the Neptune-like Planet 9 in the solar system’s outer reaches with some of the big shots he’s about to land.
“I never aim for lower than the top, and Jai is the man at the moment,” Nyika said Jai McAllister. “By the end of the time I sparred with him, I got the hang of him. We have made the executive decision to stop working with him because we have all the information we need.”
It sounds like Nyika figured Opetaia out towards the end of their sparring and probably discovered the key to beating him. It’s pretty clear. He doesn’t handle pressure well, and his resume is fairly 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 everyone out of the water, and he’s done it pretty well. I saw the guys that he fought, and none of them really had solid or sound game plans,” Nyika said of many of the soft guys that Opetaia beat.
Quality of enemies
It’s been pretty easy for Opetaia to score knockouts because he hasn’t fought quality opposition in his career, aside from his two fights against Briedis.
Opetaia’s best opponents:
– Mairis Briedis
– Jack Massey
– Ellis Zorro
– Jordan Thompson
– Mark Flanagan
These are not great fighters. The only one you could say was good was Briedis, but he was past his prime at 39. Any fighter can look good when they feast on the type of opposition Opetaia has fought his entire 10-year professional career.
