By Sean McDaniel: If WBC heavyweight champion Vitali Klitschko (44-2, 40 KO’s) can make quick work of unbeaten challenger Manuel Charr (21-0, 11 KO’s) tonight it will increase the possibilities that Vitali will return early in 2013, if not late 2012, to face Britain’s David Haye in a mega fight. Vitali needs an impressive confidence booster in order to take on a fighter as dangerous as Haye.

Vitali really struggled in his last fight agaisnt Dereck Chisora last February and looked slow and tired through much of the fight. While you can blame a big portion of Vitali’s problems in that fight in him injuring his left shoulder early in the fight there’s still no getting away from the fact that Vitali wore down under the pressure from Chisora. Charr, 27, is even younger than Chisora, and he’ll have seen how Vitali had problems with the pressure in that fight. Charr will try and walk Vitali down the same way that Chisora did to get the 41-year-old Vitali to use up his energy as early as possible in the fight.

It’s still going to be a situation where Charr will need a knockout or an injury from Vitali for him to win, because he’s not going to be able to win a lot of rounds against Vitali. Chisora won a small handful but it wasn’t easy. Chisora had to walk through a lot of shots in order to win those rounds, and it’s unclear whether Charr has the chin to take the kinds of big shots that Vitali will be nailing him with in this fight.

In a perfect world, Vitali will get Charr out of there early and he’ll then agree to fight Haye in either late December or early 2013 rather than retiring. Vitali has the elections coming up in Ukraine in October, and if he’s elected he may opt to retire unless the lure for one final fight against Haye is too much for him to resist.