Heavyweight Denis Boytsov (33-1, 26 KOs) will be back in the ring near the end of the month in a fight against little known Timur Musafarov (6-1, 5 KOs) in a tune-up bout on the same card as Marco Huck vs. Miko Larghetti title fight at the Gerry Weber Stadion in Halle/Westfalen, Germany, according to Fightnews.
The Boytsov-Musafarov fight will be the co-feature bout on the card. That’s kind of fitting because the main event between WBO cruiserweight champion Huck and #12 WBO Larghetti shapes up to be a horrible mismatch, and adding another mismatch between Boytsov and Musafarov seems to fit in well with the main event of the card.
The A-side fighters are going to shine big time on this card, whereas the B-side is going to get wiped out and totally dominated.
Boytsov was easily beaten in his last fight against the hard hitting but limited Alex Leapai last November in losing by a 10 round decision in their WBO heavyweight title eliminator bout. Boytsov was dropped in the fight and he fought poorly throughout by standing directly in front of Leapai and using very little head movement.
Boytsov made Leapai look better than he actually was. Leapai went on to challenge IB/IBO/WBA/WBO heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko last April in losing by a 5th round knockout. With the way that Leapai was dominated by Wladimir suggests that Boytsov would have beaten equally bad by the Ukrainian fighter even if he had somehow beaten Leapai.
The 6’1”, 222 pound Boytsov lacks the size to do well in the heavyweight division against the bigger heavyweights. We saw Boytov’s limitations loud in clear with him getting totally dominated by the 250 pound Leapai, who made Boytsov look like a small cruiserweight in comparison. It would be in Boytsov’s best interest to try and lose weight to drop down to cruiserweight because he doesn’t have the size to compete against the better heavyweights in the division.
Boytsov will likely KO Musafarov, but he’s still going to have problems when he eventually steps it up again at some point in the future.