Nyika to exploit Opetaia’s pressing weakness?

IBF cruiserweight champion Jai Opetaia expects challenger David Nyika to be wayward because he won’t want to be beaten when they meet in their 12-round headliner this Wednesday, January 8, at the Gold Coast Convention Center. Broadbeach, Australia. The event will be available to watch live on DAZN.

Opetaia (26-0, 20 KOs) has faced the undefeated Nyika (10-0, 9 KOs) with the IBF No. 10 ranking, and feels that he will not want to test his power. He thinks it will hurt Nyika if he connects with something.

Fights frostbite

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

Nyika saw what Mairis Briedis he did the left-handed Opetaia in his return last year and knows 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 their rematch with the 39-year-old Briedis on May 18. He could not cope with the pressure that the former champion put on him.

I wonder what Turki Al-Shiekh thought when he saw Opetaia. He looked like a classic example of a soldier combat freeze. Opetaia seemed locked up, frozen and mentally paralyzed by 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’m 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’s support. “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 what his fight with Nyika would be like. “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 it goes.”

Taking advantage of weakness

Opetaia, 29, is being backed now, but it could all come to an end if Nyika launches him to the Neptune-like Planet 9 in the outer solar system with some of the big shots he’ll land on.

“I never aim lower than the top, and Jai is the man at the moment,” Nyika said Jai McAllister. “Toward the end of the time I was fighting him, I was winning him over. We made an executive decision to stop working with him because we had all the information we needed.”

It seems that Nyika discovered Opetaia towards the end of his spars and probably discovered the key to defeating him. It’s pretty obvious. He doesn’t handle pressure well, and his resume is fairly barren of quality opposition. He’s only fought one good guy, Briedis, and that was late in 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 that really well. I’ve seen the guys he’s gone up against, and none of them really had solid or solid game plans,” Nyika said of many of the guys soft that Opetaia has won.

Quality of enemies

It’s been pretty easy for Opetaia to score knockouts because he hasn’t been fighting quality opposition in his career, aside from his two bouts against Briedis.

Opetaia’s best opponents:

– Mairis Briedis
—Jack Massey
– Ellis Zorro
– Jordan Thompson
– Mark Flanagan

These are not great fighters. The only one who can be said to be good was Briedis, but he passed his best years at 39 years old. Any fighter can look good when he’s reveling in the kind of opposition Opetaia has been fighting his entire 10-year professional career.