By Dave Lahr: We saw in the last fight between IBF/WBO heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko (54-3, 48 KO’s) and Samuel Peter (34-3, 27 KO’s) that Wladimir was unwilling to let Peter do much of anything on offense. Wladimir, over and over again, clinched Peter any time the Nigerian fighter would get anywhere close to him. While I think two or three clinches is acceptable per round, Wladimir was going way over that in his strategy to prevent Peter from throwing any of his brutal head shots.

The referee wasn’t going anything and just let Wladimir clinch Peter all night long without taking any points off. What resulted was one of the more boring fights I’ve seen in quite some time, but also a disappointing fight if you were hoping to see an exciting heavyweight clash.

When you’ve got one fighter that is intent on shutting down the other one by using tactics such as constant clinching, there’s really only a couple of things that can change this. One, the referee has got to step in and do his job by warning, taking off points if the action continues and finally disqualifying the fighter if they fail to pay attention to his warnings.

There were neither warnings nor penalizations given to Wladimir. As such, Peter really needed to take things into his own hands and hammer Wladimir in the clinches to keep him from continuing to clinch all night. In some ways, Peter did a decent job of tagging Wladimir when he had him hugging him, but he still didn’t do as good of a job as he should have. If I’m Peter’s trainer, that’s the number #1 thing I’m going to be working on during this training camp to prepare for Klitschko. Peter has to study how to keeper Wladimir from hugging him all night long and prevent him from using his stall tactics. The fighter I would have Peter studying closely is Alfredo Angulo. He’s someone that absolutely refuses to be clinched and he makes his opponents pay if they try to grab him. I would study Angulo’s fights closely and they maybe bring him into training camp for a day or two for him to give Peter some in depth training on how to prevent Wladimir from clinching him like no tomorrow.

That’s really the main thing that Peter needs to do in terms of training for this fight, because in a head to head fight without Wladimir clinching continuously, I think Peter will be much strong for him and will knock him out. But Peter has to keep Wladimir from doing any clinching whatsoever. Peter needs to make Klitschko fight, and make him use his skinny legs to move around the ring.

If Peter can do that, he’ll almost surely knock Wladimir out in six to eight rounds. The key is to keep Wladimir from clinching. Do I think Wladimir can win without clinching? No. I think Wladimir doesn’t have the stamina to run around the ring for 12 rounds trying to keep Peter from landing. I think Wladimir can do it for around six rounds, but after that he’s going to tire out and be forced to fight Peter.