Journeyman Dillian Whyte has come up with the winning strategy for ‘The Gypsy King’ Tyson Fury to dethrone unified heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk on December 21st.
According to Whyte, Fury’s strategy to beat Usyk boils down to using the same roughhouse tactics he used to defeat former cruiserweight champion Steve Cunningham 11 years ago in 2013. In that fight, the then-25-year-old Fury did a lot of holding, leaning, and throwing clubbing shots.
Dirty Tactics Won’t Work
To score the knockout, Fury held Cunningham in place with his left forearm, pinning him to the ropes and then nailing him with his right hand. The referee should NOT have stopped the fight because that was a highly illegal and obvious move.
“Usyk was showing some things in the last fight that he’s only shown in the amateurs. He’s never shown in the professionals,” said Dillian Whyte to the talkSport Boxing channel, revealing how little he knows about Oleksandr Usyk’s career with his narrow view of how he fights.
“I still think Fury can beat him. He’s the much bigger man and has the size advantage. He needs to fight him like he fought Steve Cunningham. That’s how he needs to fight Usyk. Be dirty and have a good,” said Whyte.
Dillian fails to mention that Cunningham was over the hill, having lost three out of his last four fights going into the fight with Fury. In other words, Cunningham was nowhere near the level that Usyk is now and fought a poor fight, allowing Fury to hold & lean on him all night rather than shoving him hard to keep him from using his weight to wear him down. Usyk didn’t allow Fury to use his leaning.
When Tyson attempted to hold, Usyk shoved him away with full force, sending the giant backward. You could see from those shoves that Usyk was more powerful than him, which is strange because he was so much lighter.
Fury has weak upper body strength. His weight is centered around his midsection and his basketball player-like legs. Regarding upper body strength, Fury has the strength of a light heavyweight, not a powerful one. Artur Beterbiev is a bigger puncher than Fury, and he fights at 175.
The basic problem Fury has in using the same game plan he employed against an over-the-hill Cunningham is that Usyk won’t allow him to hold and lean. Moreover, there’s zero chance that Fury can use an illegal forearm to hold Usyk still and then club him with his right hand.
That tactic will not work against Usyk because he will not be fighting with his back against the ropes like Cunningham foolishly did in their fight on April 20, 2013.
Fury’s Age Shows
Another problem confronting Fury is that he’s much older than when he fought Cunningham. That fight happened BEFORE Fury fought Wladimir Klitschko; he was lighter on his feet back then. He was an entirely different fighter than the older, 50-ish-looking heavyweight he is today.
The years have been hard on Fury, and he’s aged rapidly. Some people age slowly, but in Fury’s case, he’s physically not anything near the person he was in his mid-20s. As such, the game plan that Whyte would like Fury to use against Usyk is physically impossible.
The only way it would have a chance of working is if Usyk stood with his back against the ropes and allowed Fury to hold him in place to line him up for a right hand. That’s not going to happen.
Fury’s best chance of winning is to stay in the center of the ring and attempt to nail Usyk with an uppercut to the head or a body shot. It’s common knowledge that Usyk’s kryptonite is getting hit to the body. We saw that in his fight with Daniel Dubois when Usyk was dropped by a shot to the body in the fifth round of their fight on August 26, 2023.
The referee ruled it was a low blow, but the replays showed that it was on the belt line. If Fury wants to win, he should focus on going to the body, not trying to illegally hold Usyk in place with a forearm and clubbing him with a free hand like he did against Cunningham.
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