Will Nyika take advantage of Opetaia’s pressing weakness?

IBF cruiserweight champion Jai Opetaia expects challenger David Nyika to be cautious because he won’t want to get hit when they meet in their 12-round headline fight this Wednesday, January 8 at the Gold Coast Convention Centre, Broadbeach, Australia. The event will be broadcast live on DAZN.

Opetaia (26-0, 20 KOs) has trained with undefeated IBF #10 ranked Nyika (10-0, 9 KOs), and feels he won’t want to test his power. He thinks he will hurt Nyika if he connects with something.

combat freeze

Opetaia is believed to have been looking beyond Nyika towards a possible fight against unified heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk, which promoter Eddie Hearn has been talking about. He is also interested in fighting a unification with WBA and WBO cruiserweight champion Gilberto ‘Zurdo’ Ramírez.

Nyika saw what Mairis Briedis he did to the southpaw Opetaia in their rematch last year and knows that he cracks under pressure. He can’t stand it when he starts getting punished, so he gets on his bike and does anything to avoid getting hit.

All of Opetaia’s mystique disappeared in the second half of his rematch against Briedis, 39, on May 18. He could not withstand the pressure that the former champion put on him.

I wonder what Turki Al-Shiekh thought when he saw Opetaia. He seemed like a classic example of a soldier in combat freeze. Opetaia seemed locked in, frozen and mentally paralyzed by the pressure Briedis was putting on him. Turki must have seen what I saw. Opetaia looked like a complete disaster. 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’m still acting,” Jai Opetaia told Jai McAllister. YouTube channel, talking about Turki Al-Shiekh backing him. “The pressure is there, let’s do it. Like I said, ‘It’s a matter of life and death.’

“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 would play out. “I know he doesn’t want to get hit, because I know if I hit him, he’ll get hurt. It will be a chess game. Let’s see how it goes.”

Exploit weakness

Opetaia, 29, has backup now, but it could all end if Nyika sends him to the Neptune-like Planet 9 in the outer reaches of the solar system with some of the bigwigs he’ll land.

“I never aim to be lower than I am, and Jai is the man right now,” Nyika said. Jai McAllister. “Towards the end of the time I was training with him, I was getting the best out of him. “We made the executive decision to stop working with him because we got all the information we needed.”

It seems that Nyika discovered Opetaia towards the end of their fights and probably discovered the key to defeating him. It’s pretty obvious. He doesn’t handle pressure well and his resume lacks quality opponents. He’s 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 tries to blow everyone out of the water and he’s done a pretty good job. I’ve seen the guys he’s fought, and none of them really had strong or solid game plans,” Nyika said of many of the soft guys Opetaia has beaten.

Quality of enemies

It’s been pretty easy for Opetaia to score knockouts because he hasn’t fought quality opponents during his career, aside 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 is past his best years at 39 years old. Any fighter can look good when he revels in the type of opponent Opetaia has been fighting his entire 10-year professional career.