By William Mackay: WBC heavyweight champion (45-2, 40 KO’s) suffered a bad injury to his left shoulder in the 3rd round of his 12 round unanimous decision win over challenger Dereck Chosora (15-3, 9 KO’), resulting in the 40-year-old Vitali being unable to use his left arm from that point on.

Vitali had an MRI performed on his left shoulder after the bout in Munich, Germany, and a partial tear of the shoulder was found in addition to nerve damage. The prognosis is the shoulder won’t require surgery, but Vitali will be out as long as 6-8 weeks while the shoulder slowly heals.

It’s hoped that the shoulder won’t require surgery, as that would mean many more months out of the ring for Vitali. He wants to get back in the ring by the summer to face former WBA heavyweight champion David Haye if he can get the British fighter to agree to the money offer that was given to him. If not, then Vitali will move on and face someone like Tyson Fury, Alexander Dimitrenko or Bermane Stiverne next.

Despite Vitali fighting using exclusively just his right hand, he was still able to throw and land more punches than the younger 28-year-old Chisora. However, it required for Vitali to move around the ring a lot more than he’s been accustomed to in the past and by the end of the fight you could see that Vitali was pretty well exhausted. Chisora faded as well, but not quite to the extent of Vitali.

Chisora became really sloppy in the last two rounds with him throwing desperate shots that often missed by a mile making him look amateurish. Chisora literally had to shoot for a knockout with every punch, and given that he’s never been a one punch knockout type fighter, he didn’t have a prayer to win.

Vitali would have easily have won this fight had he been able to use his jab because Chisora was pretty well controlled by Tyson Fury in his loss to him by getting hit with a lot of jabs. Chisora also has problems with Sam Sexton, who has excellent jab and was using it to keep Chisora on the outside for much of the fight.