IBF cruiserweight champion Jay Obitaya expects his challenger David Nica to be cautious as he will not want to take a beating when they meet in their 12-round main event bout on Wednesday, January 8, at the Gold Coast Convention Centre, Broadbeach, Australia. The event will be shown live on DAZN.
Opetaia (26-0, 20 KOs) sparred with unbeaten IBF No. 10 ranked Nyika (10-0, 9 KOs), and he feels he won't want to taste his power. He thinks he will hurt Nika if he comes into contact with anything.
Anti-freeze
It is believed that Opetaia was looking beyond Nyika towards a potential fight against unified heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk, something that promoter Eddie Hearn has been talking about. He is also interested in fighting for a unification with WBA and WBO cruiserweight champion Gilberto “Zordo” Ramirez.
Nika saw what Mairis Bridis What he did to southpaw Obitaya in the rematch last year and he knows he cracks under pressure. He can't handle it when he starts receiving punishment, so he rides his bike and does anything to avoid getting beaten.
Obitaya's mystique was completely gone in the second half of his rematch with the 39-year-old Briedis on May 18. He couldn't stand the pressure the former champion put on him.
I wonder what Turki Al-Sheikh thought when he saw Obitiya. He looked like a classic example of a soldier in Freeze the fight. Obitaya appeared trapped, frozen and mentally paralyzed from the pressure Briedis was putting on him. Turki had to see 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,” Jay Obitaya told Jay McAllister YouTube The channel talks about Turki Al-Sheikh’s support for him. “The pressure is on, let's do this. Like I said, 'It's life or death.'
“I don't know. I'm curious to see how he'll come out, how aggressive he'll be,” Obitaya said when asked how his fight with Nika will end. “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 match. Let's see how it goes.”
Exploiting vulnerability
Opetaia, 29, is backed now, but that could all end if Nyika launches him to the Neptune-like Planet 9 in the outer reaches of the solar system with some big shots to land.
“I never aim to get any lower than the top, and Jay is the man now,” Nika said. Jay McAllister. “At the end of the time I was competing with him, I was beating him. We made the executive decision to stop working with him because we had all the information we needed.”
Nyika appears to have discovered Opetaia near the end of the spars and likely discovered the key to overcoming him. This is very clear. He doesn't handle pressure well, and his resume is completely devoid of quality competitors. He 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's trying to blow everyone out of the water, and he's done a pretty good job of that. I've seen the guys he's fought, and none of them had solid or sound game plans,” Nyika said of a lot of the soft guys Opetaia has beaten.
Quality of enemies
It has been very easy for Obitaya to score knockouts because he has never fought a quality opponent during his career, with the exception of his two fights against Briedis.
Obitaya's best opponents:
– Mairis Bridis
– Jack Massey
– Ellis Zorro
– Jordan Thompson
– Mark Flanagan
These are not great fighters. The only guy you can say is good is Briedis, but he's past his best years at 39 years old. Any fighter can look good when they feed off the type of opposition Obitaya has fought throughout his 10-year professional career.
