By Michael Collins: British heavyweight Dereck Chisora’s big fight against WBC heavyweight champion Vitali Klitschko is only a little more than three weeks away and already the 28-year-old Chisora looks as lean as he’s ever been as a heavyweight.
He looks ready and in fighting shape right now, ready to go 12 rounds if need be. However, it may not matter what kind of shape that Chisora comes in for this fight because he’s so badly overmatched. Chisora is predicting an eighth round knockout but he’s being laughed at by a lot of boxing fans who don’t take anything he says seriously.
Chisora is in excellent shape and he does seem to really believe that he’s going to beat Vitali, but he doesn’t have anything in his arsenal that gives him any advantage. At least if this was David Haye, you could point to his hand speed, power, movement and defensive ability that would give him a fair shot of pulling off an upset over Vitali but you can’t do that with Chisora because he doesn’t have any of those areas where he’s superior to Vitali.
Chisora looks to be in the shape of his life but he’s also so much smaller than Vitali and that’s going to create problems for him in trying to land. Chisora was hit enough in his last fight against Robert Helenius to have his face swollen up. Helenius isn’t a tireless worker like Vitali and he wasn’t able to land enough of his shots to really hurt Chisora.
Vitali will almost surely land a lot of his power shots in addition to his short arm punches that he likes to use to bludgeon his opponents into submission. Chisora is going to be getting hit a lot and the conditioning likely won’t mean much when he’s having to eat a ton of heavy shots.