Comments Thread For: Mairis Briedis Decisions Mike Perez, Set To Fight Usyk Next

[NEETzsche]

That was a painful watch. I feel like if the ref hadn't been so involved then maybe Perez would've been able to land some stuff up close and perhaps discourage Briedis from clinching so much, and something resembling a fight might've broken out

[GOLDKING]

just like watching andre ward fight. skills tho.

[g27region]

Few things about Briedis/Perez

- Perez was better than I've expected, was probably at the top of his game. Unfortunately for him, it was a bad stylistic matchup. Briedis outsmarted Perez, made him fight his game, imposed the rhyth of the fight on him. And Perez couldn't do nothing about it. It was ugly and grimy, Ward/Klitschko/Huck type of performance, but Briedis executed the game plan perfectly from tactical point of view. That clinching game got under Perez skin to the point when it looked like Briedis took his will, Perez wasn't mentally there in the late rounds

- This style won't work with Usyk, it will be hard to smoother offense of much faster and dynamic target than you, with a better range too. But if you think this is the only thing Briedis is capable of, you're damn wrong. He's more versatile than that and he actually can be exciting, you need to watch some of his other fights, it's just he forced Perez to fight dirty because he thought that was the best way to expose the weakness of his opponent, maybe because he respected his power too. One thing for sure, Briedis is not as simple as some people might think, he actually can surprise Usyk with new dimensions of his game.

I still expect Usyk to win, because Usyk is the worse matchup for Brideis than Briedis is for Usyk. If Briedis think he can clinch his way to the W against Usyk, well...We already watched how Usyk demolished war torn version of Huck and then we'll see how he can deal with young version of Huck in Briedis. I'm more worried about Dorticos, because we still don't know what his real potential is.