Is Opetaia vulnerable to Nyika’s power? Champion Shows Signs Of Pressure

Jai Opetaia predicts he will “hurt” and “sleep” David Nyika in their headliner at the Gold Coast Convention Centre, Broadbeach, Australia, on Wednesday night.

Obadiah’s anger

IBF cruiserweight champion Opetaia (26-0, 20 KOs) has from 1 to 10 on the anger scale when talking about challenger Nyika (10-0, 9 KOs) who has the nerve to say he wants a “dog fight” on Wednesday. I don’t know why it bothers Opetaia so much that Nyika believes he is going to win. The only conclusion I can come to is he is insecure.

Opetaia got fierce eyes and her blood pressure seemed to boil. If they were to put a BP cuff on him, I would expect it to be 180/120 in the danger level. You can 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 strength, ring IQ and 6’6″ size to take advantage.

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 The pounding groundtalk about how quickly he became popular.

“We just keep moving forward. We don’t look back. Any of these guys that try to take us from the top, we have to put them in their place, and that’s what I want to do,” Opetaia continued. “I just want to fight. knock me out This will be the best sleep I’ve had in years since my surgeries,” Jai said of Nyika using post-it notes and talking about his goal of knocking him out.

“I expect a hard fight. He’s a good, creative fighter, and he’s smart in that ring. He keeps talking about wanting a dogfight. Let’s get it, but he knows. He’s going to have to fight smart. He doesn’t want to be hit. Whatever he comes out with, that’s what we have to adapt to,” Opetaia said.

This could be a tougher fight than Jai expects, and he will need to be 100% ready. Nyika has a blueprint to follow, using the pressure tactics and showdowns that Mairis Briedis successfully used to give Opetaia pure hell in their rematch last year on May 18. Jai probably prefers to forget about that fight, but Nyika. He uses it for study purposes and will try to duplicate and improve the success that Latvia had.

The “Sleep” Guarantee

“He is a tall orthodox. He has a strange style about him, but he uses it well. We can snap him. I can hurt this guy. He keeps talking about a dogfight, but if I hit this guy, he’s going to sleep, I guarantee it. So how much of a dogfight does he want?” says Opetaia.

Nyika can surprise Opetaia with his strength and the dog he has in him as he turns this fight into an all-out war on Wednesday night. Opetaia is a bigger version of Dmitri Bivol, and he doesn’t like having someone throw him back. He’s fine when he’s the one unloading 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. Apart from that, Opetaia is a different fighter because he is not a combo puncher like him. He mostly focuses on loading up on left hands.

We have seen this work well for Jai in his recent fights against Jack Massey, Ellis Zorro and Jordan Thompson. Neither of those guys are first-tier fighters in the truest sense, so Opetaia dominated them with his left hand alone.

Where he couldn’t get over it was in his two fights with Mairis Briedis. He got relieved by the former champion and took a lot of punishment on his face. In the last fight, he didn’t look recognizable as Briedis hit him with a few shots that turned him into a Halloween mask.