By Scott Gilfoid: With the WBC title match between champion Samuel Peter (30-1, 23 KOs) and champion emeritus Vitali Klitschko (35-2, 34 KOs) only moments away, I thought it would be a good chance to chime in with my own take on this big fight, which will perhaps be the biggest heavyweight match-up of 2008 by far. Peter, 28, is coming into this bout with one of his best victories of his career, a 6th round destruction of Oleg Maskaev in March. Peter showed awesome power in dispatching the Russian fighter, hurting him badly with powerful right hand shots.

However, in tonight’s bout at the O2 World Arena, in Berlin, Germany, Peter will have to chop down a much bigger tree in the way of 6′8″ Vitali Klitschko. If Peter thought he had it bad in his 12-round decision loss to the more athletic Klitschko brother, Wladimir, in 2005, he’s possibly got even more trouble in having to deal with a more savage and brutal Klitschko. When you strip away all of the subtle niceties of Wladimir, you get a raw slugger in the way of Vitali, who tends to hammer his opponents into the canvas with his big right and left hook. Peter will be facing for the first time a fighter with as much power as him, if not more, and a chin of equal worth. This may be a problem for Peter unless Vitali somehow implodes in the latter half of the fight through exhaustion.

If he doesn’t tire out, Peter is in for what will likely be a beating of comparable to the one that Vitali’s last opponent, Danny Williams, suffered at the hands of Vitali in December 2004. Vitali has a near perfect knockout percentage, defeating 35 opponents with 34 occurring by knockout. This isn’t something to be ignored and it suggests that if Peter makes the mistake of thinking he can go right at Vitali, looking for an easy knockout, he will probably run into something big and get taken out himself.

With all the talk that has been going back and forth between the two fighters, in which Peter, in one quote, saying he plans “chopping down” Vitali, not much thought has been made about what may happen with Peter if he goes after Vitali. Most of Vitali’s opponents, aside from Danny Williams and Corrie Sanders, fought him very cautiously, staying away from him as much as possible. Yet he was still able to catch up to them eventually and take them out in almost all cases. However, Peter is likely to make Vitali’s job much easier by going after him from the very start.

This may turn out to be a disastrous mistake on Peter’s part if he sticks to this game plan, because Vitali has a powerful uppercut and straight right hand that he likes to throw at his opponents when they come at him. If Peter continuously comes forward in the same manner that Sanders and Williams did, Vitali will make mincemeat of Peter’s face, using it as a catchers’ mitt for the big right hands he’ll not doubt be blasting him with.

I’d like to give Peter some credit and think that he’ll have a plan B to fall back on, but I don’t see that happening. He fights in the same manner each time, going straight ahead and trying to knockout all his opponents. If it doesn’t work for him, he’ll keep at it no matter what the circumstances. As such, I think he’ll be in trouble once Vitali starts unloading on him with big power shots. He’ll take them alright for awhile but eventually, he’s going to be a bloody, swollen mess, and I see the fight being stopped at that point, probably by the 8th round.

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