Deontay Wilder will knockout Tyson Fury – says Shelly Finkel

By Boxing News - 07/16/2021 - Comments

By Charles Brun: Deontay ‘Bronze Bomber’ Wilder will regain his WBC heavyweight title by knocking out champion Tyson Fury on October 9th, claims manager Shelly Finkel.

Deontay (42-1-1, 41 KOs) now knows the holes in Fury’s game, and he’s going to be taking advantage of them in their third meeting on October 9th at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas Nevada.

The Fury-Wilder 3 fight was supposed to have taken place this month on July 24th, but Fury had a short-term illness that he suffered after contracting COVID-19.

Despite only testing positive for one week before recovering from the flu, the fight was still rescheduled for October 9th.  There might be more than just Fury’s COVID-19 illness that went into pushing the fight back to October.

Eddie Hearn says the ticket sales were poor for the July 24th fight, so rescheduling for October 9th might help if they can steadily promote the Fury vs. Wilder III event daily.

Image: Deontay Wilder will knockout Tyson Fury - says Shelly Finkel

Deontay needs to be prepared for Fury’s rabbit punching

Wilder will need to be prepared for these two things that Fury used successfully in the second fight to win:

  • Rabbit punching
  • Holding excessively & putting all his weight on Deontay

If you look at the last fight, Fury landed some VERY hard rabbit punches on Wilder and got away with it because the referee took a laissez-faire approach to control the fouling.

Basically, the fight was like a wild west affair where the normal rules to control rabbit punching were seemingly forgotten. This played into Fury’s hands as he landed some textbook rabbit shots that took Wilder’s legs away early.

You can’t understate how important Fury’s early work with the rabbit punching was for him.  The referee was standing there and doing nothing about it, which left Wilder out there hanging in the wind, taking the shots.

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With the numerous punches to the back of the head Fury landed, you can argue that he should have been disqualified.

Fury will use holding/leaning to wear Wilder down

The holding and leaning that Fury used against Wilder were no less important than the shots to the back of the head.

In the first quarter of the fight, Fury tied Wilder up repeatedly, wrapping him up in bearhugs and then leaning all of his 270lb weight on him to wear his legs out.

Wilder will need to figure out a way to deal with all the holding & leaning that Fury uses because he’s going to go back to that trick in the trilogy match on October 9th to wear his legs down.

When you get a fighter that is purposefully holding and putting all their weight on you to weaken your legs, you’ve got to devise a tactic to limit this kind of thing.

The referee is supposed to warn fighters that clinch excessively and then take points off, but we didn’t see that last time in Wilder vs. Fury II rematch in 2020. Fury got away with nonstop holding, and it helped him weaken Wilder’s legs.

Image: Deontay Wilder will knockout Tyson Fury - says Shelly Finkel

“I definitely believe that Deontay is going to win his title back by knocking out Tyson Fury,” said Wilder’s co-manager Shelly Finkel to Sky Sports.

You have to give Deontay an excellent chance of winning the fight by knockout due to how Fury has seemingly slacked off. The eye of the tiger that Fury before he came into all this money, it’s gone.

Tyson is no longer hungry

Fury has now become a bon vivant, a guy that enjoys luxurious living from being a millionaire many times over. You can argue that Fury has become an English version of Andy Ruiz Jr.

We saw how Ruiz Jr stopped training hard after making a bunch of money in his first fight with Joshua in June 2019. Ruiz Jr hasn’t looked the same since, and likely. He’ll never regain what he had before he became filthy rich.

He now has the best clothes, cars, houses, and he’s eating the best foods. The spartan lifestyle that Fury had before he became rich appears to be over.

If you look at Wilder, the money hasn’t changed him. Although Wilder is wealthy like Fury, he’s still in the trenches, sweating, working hard to improve his game so that he wins the trilogy.

“They both have the power to hurt each other,” said trainer Malik Scott about Wilder and Fury. “The difference is that Deontay has the power to knock you out.

Fury is undefeated but is vulnerable. That won’t make sense to most humans.”

As we saw in the second fight, Fury has enough power to stop Wilder if he can land enough clubbing shots to the head. It will be harder for Fury to do this in the third fight because Wilder likely won’t be incapacitated from being hurt by repeated rabbit shots early.

Of course, that depends on the referee. If we’ve got another referee that does zero to control Fury’s rabbit punching, Wilder may not last long under those circumstances.

It’s pretty clear that Fury is vulnerable in the chin department, and he’s likely not to be anywhere near as good as he was in his second fight with Deontay.

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Since the second fight with Wilder, Fury has lost a lot of muscle weight, and it’s not likely that he will gain it back by October. I imagine Fury will try and bulk up again, but I doubt he’ll be able to do it in three months.

Tyson will be lighter for the trilogy match

Fury isn’t going to beat Wilder weighing a fat 256 lbs. He’s got to get back to the low 270s to have a chance of bullying Deontay and forcing him to fight defensively off the ropes. That’s not going to happen.

It’s unclear what Fury was eating or doing in training camp to get to 273, but it doesn’t appear he’s going to be able to regain that muscle weight quickly enough to be ready for the trilogy match in October.

Besides Fury lacking the weight needed for him to succeed, Fury won’t be able to use the rabbit punching to dominate Wilder like he did last time.

The referee will likely be told to police the fouling during the trilogy match so that there’s no rabbit punching going on like in the second fight.