Sebastian Fundora will attempt to dethrone WBO junior middleweight champion Tim Tszyu and capture the vacant WBC title this Saturday, March 30th, on Prime Video PPV at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.
Fundora (20-1-1, 13 KOs) is a longshot to win, considering what he’s up against with the hard-hitting Tszyu (24-0, 17 KOs), but you can’t rule out an upset victory.
The Challenge for Fundora
The 6’5′ Fundora has the height, work rate, and more than enough power to win. What’s unknown is whether Fundora’s chin can hold up under Tszyu’s power, especially after his seventh-round knockout loss to Brian Mendoza last April.
“I don’t think the last-minute change is going to disrupt Tszyu, and I think it’s his fight to win,” said boxing expert Shawn Porter to the Probox TV YouTube channel about Tim Tszyu’s battle this Saturday against Sebastian Fundora.
“We can criticize Tszyu’s resume, but he’s ascending, and I’ll say this. If you can beat Fundora, it puts you on a certain level of world-class,” said Paulie Malignaggi. “Fundora is a world-class fighter.”
We don’t know how good Tszyu is because his opposition has been less than stellar during his eight-year professional career. His best guys, the 29-year-old Tszyu has faced are these fighters:
Brian Mendoza
Steve Spark
Tony Harrison
Carlos Ocampo
Jeff Horn
Terrell Gausha
Dennis Hogan
Tszyu Favored, But Fundora Unpredictable
“He has his hiccups. There are certainly discrepancies inside his style that make him beatable. For one, he’s very hittable. If I take this remote control and I throw it this way [backward], I might hit him,” Malignaggi continued about Fundora.
“He’s not very defensively apt, but he is very, very attack-minded, and he’s very exciting. If you can’t handle that offense, he will hurt you and get you out of there.”
If Fundora has learned how to use his 6’5″ height during the last 11 months that he’s been out of the ring, he’s got a chance of upsetting Tszyu. That’s unlikely, though, because Fundora seems pretty set in his ways, and he doesn’t have fast hands.
Even if he tried to keep the action on the outside, Tszyu would get to him in short order.
“I also feel that Tim is very cerebral-minded in there as well. He’s not just a guy that hits hard and has all this hype behind him,” said Malignaggi. “This guy still comes from the Eastern European school of boxing. You know how I feel about that. There’s a lot of psychology with that.
“This guy [Tszyu] is from Australia, but he came from an Eastern European family and trained in that Eastern European style. His style inside the ring is he’s a menace in there, and I think he’s going to go very far,” said Malignaggi.