By Dave Lahr: Former WBO heavyweight champion Shannon Briggs (51-5-1, 45 KO’s) has been selected out of all the possible top 15 opponents to face World Boxing Council heavyweight champion Vitali Klitschko (40-2, 38 KO’s) next month on October 16th at the O2 World Arena, Altona, in Hamburg, Germany. As far as I can tell, next to no one is giving poor Briggs any chance of beating Vitali in this fight.

They all think the 38-year-old Briggs is an old man with breathing problems. Well, I’m here to tell you that Briggs has a very good chance of winning this fight and winning it in an impressive manner. What Briggs needs to do is pull a Lennox Lewis on Vitali and rip his eyes up with huge slicing punches to get him bleeding like a stuck pig.

This is exactly what happened to Klitschko in his loss to Lewis seven years ago in 2003. Klitschko started off well boxing and landing mostly short punches. But Lewis began to find him with right hands every now and then. Before long, Vitali was clinching like his brother Wladimir Klitschko and trying to get Lewis to stop hammering him around the eyes.

Lewis took those opportunities to land huge uppercuts that ripped open Vitali’s mouth and hand him bleeding from his mouth and eyes. What Briggs has to do is just load up on everything he throws and focus on landing his shots around the eye level The rest of it will take care of itself because Vitali has weak paper thin skin around his eyes and will cut almost immediately if he gets hit hard enough by Briggs.

That’s what Shannon needs to, because once Vitali is cut and bleeding, he’ll be easy pickings for Briggs because he won’t be able to see the incoming fire. Also, there will be a much bigger chance of the referee stepping in and halting the fight. If Briggs fights really hard from the 1st round on, he could get a stoppage by the 5th or 6th round.

At that point, he would win the fight because he would have built up a nice lead because of his early work. Briggs can’t go wrong by blasting Klitschko around the eyes, believe me. We saw what Kevin Johnson was able to do in his fight with Vitali using just jabs alone.

Can you imagine what Briggs would do once he starts tagging Vitali with big right hands? Vitali is going to look like he was rolling around on the floor in a meat packing plant.