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 8th, 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 unbeaten #10 IBF-rated Nyika (10-0, 9 KOs), and he feels he’s not going to want to taste his power. He thinks he’ll hurt Nyika if he connects with anything.
Combat Freeze
It’s believed that Opetaia has been looking past Nyika towards a potential fight against unified heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk, which promoter Eddie Hearn has been talking about. He’s also interested in fighting a unification 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 whole mystique disappeared in the second half of his rematch with the 39-year-old Briedis on May 18th. He could not cope with 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 combat freeze. Opetaia looked locked up, frozen, and mentally paralyzed from the pressure Briedis was putting on him. Turki had to have seen what I saw. Opetaia looked like a complete mess. He appeared broken at the end of that fight.
“I am happy with all the backing. They back me because I keep winning fights. I keep performing,” said Jai Opetaia to Jai McAllister’s YouTube channel, talking about Turki Al-Shiekh backing 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,” said Opetaia when asked how his fight with Nyika would play out. “I know he doesn’t want to get hit, because I know if I f**** hit him, he’s going to be hurt. It’s going to be a chess match. Let’s see how he goes.”
Exploiting Weakness
Opetaia, 29, is being backed now, but it all could end if Nyika blasts him to the Neptune-like Planet 9 in the solar system’s outer reaches with some of the big shots he will be landing.
“I never aim for lower than the top, and Jai is the man right now,” Nyika told Jai McAllister. “Towards the end of the time that I was sparring with him, I was getting the better of him. We made the executive decision to stop working with him because we got all the intel that we need.”
It sounds like Nyika figured out Opetaia towards the end of their spars and likely discovered the key to beating him. It’s pretty obvious. He doesn’t deal with pressure well, and his resume is pretty barren of quality opposition. 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 everybody out of the water, and he’s done a pretty good job of it. I’ve seen the guys that he’s fought, and none of them really had solid or sound game plans,” said Nyika about a lot of the soft guys that Opetaia has beaten.
Quality Of Foes
It’s been pretty easy for Opetaia to score knockouts because he’s not been fighting 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 that is good was Briedis, but he was past his best years at 39. Any fighter can look good when they’re feasting on the type of opposition Opetaia has been fighting his entire 10-year professional career.
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