By Michael Collins: On paper, the February 18th heavyweight title fight between WBC heavyweight champion Vitali Kltschko (43-2, 40 KO’s) and challenger Dereck Chisora (15-2, 9 KOs) shapes up to be a bit of a mismatch due to the huge differences in size, experience, power and boxing skills..
Vitali has all the advantages except one – he’s the older guy. Chisora may be younger, but he’s still not able to fight as hard as Vitali does or throw as many punches as the 6’7” Ukrainian.
To his credit, Chisora, 6’1 ½”, raised his game in a big way last December in his close 12 round split decision loss to Robert Helenius. Everyone expected for Chisora to get knocked out or badly outpointed but he fought well enough to get a decision.
He didn’t get the win but you can make a strong case that Chisora did more than enough to have nicked it by a couple of rounds. That was Chisora at his very best, as he came into the fight an in shape 243lbs and this allowed Chisora to fight hard.
Chisora will have to take the fight to Vitali in a similar manner while at the same time he’s going to have to spend more time on his defensive side of his game because he can’t afford to let Vitali land too many of his big shots for any length of time.
Chisora isn’t too impressed with a lot of the opposition that Vitali has faced but he might out the hard way that he’ll do no better than those guys did. In fact, things could go quite badly for Chisora due to Vitali being unhappy with all the trash talking Chisora has done about him and his younger brother Wladimir Klitschko.