Manager Dillian Whyte has devised a winning strategy for ‘The Gypsy King’ Tyson Fury to dethrone unified heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk on December 21.
According to White, Fury’s strategy to beat Usyk boils down to using the same rough-and-tumble tactics he used to beat former cruiserweight champion Steve Cunningham 11 years ago in 2013. In that fight, the then 25-year-old Fury did a lot of holding, leaning and throwing punches.
Dirty tactics won’t work
To score the knockout, Fury held Cunningham in place with his left forearm, pinned him against the ropes, and then nailed him with a right hand. The referee should NOT have stopped the fight because it was an extremely illegal and obvious move.
“In the last fight, Usik showed some things that he only showed in amateurs. He’s never appeared in the pros,” Dillian White told talkSport Boxing channelrevealing how little he knows about Alexander Usyk’s career with his narrow view of how he fights.
“I still think Fury can beat him.” He is a much bigger man and has a size advantage. He has to fight him like he fought Steve Cunningham. This is how he should fight against Usik. Get dirty and enjoy yourself,” White said.
Dillian fails to mention that Cunningham was over the hilllosing three of his last four fights against Fury. In other words, Cunningham was nowhere near the level Usyk is now and he put up a poor fight, allowing Fury to hold him and lean on him all night instead of pushing him hard to prevent him from using his weight to wear him down. Usyk did not allow Fury to take advantage of his tilt.
When Tyson tried to hold back, Usyk pushed him away with full force, sending the giant backwards. From those pushes, you could see that Usyk was more powerful than him, which is strange because he was much lighter.
Fury has weak upper body strength. His weight is centered on his midsection and legs like a basketball player. In terms of upper body strength, Fury has the strength of a light heavyweight, not a powerhouse. Artur Beterbiev is a bigger puncher than Fury and fights at 175.
The main problem Fury has in using the same game plan he used against Cunningham over the hill is that Usyk won’t let him stick and lean. Furthermore, there is no way Fury can use an illegal forearm to keep Usyk still and then hit him with a right hand.
That tactic won’t work against Usyk because he won’t fight with his back against the ropes like Cunningham stupidly did in their fight on April 20, 2013.
Fury’s Age Shows
Another problem Fury faces is that he is much older than when he fought Cunningham. That fight happened BEFORE Fury fought Wladimir Klitschko; he was lighter on his feet then. He was a completely different fighter than the 50-something-looking older heavyweight that he is today.
The years had been hard on Fury, and he was aging fast. Some people age slowly, but in Fury’s case, he’s nowhere near the person he was in his mid-twenties physically. As such, the game plan that White would want Fury to use against Usyk is physically impossible.
The only way it could work is for Usyk to stand with his back against the ropes and let Fury hold him in place to set him up for a right hand. That won’t happen.
Fury’s best chance to win is to stay in the center of the ring and try to nail Usyk with an uppercut to the head or a kick to the body. It is common knowledge that Usik’s kryptonite hits the body. We saw that in his fight with Daniel Dubois when Usyk fell with a body kick in the fifth round of their fight on August 26, 2023.
The referee judged it to be a low kick, but replays showed that it was on the belt line. If Fury wants to win, he should focus on going to the body rather than trying to illegally hold Usyk in place with a forearm and freehand like he did against Cunningham.