This isn’t a strong enough opponent to gauge whether Tszyu has anything left in the tank to continue fighting the best in the junior middleweight division. Still, it’s a fight that will give glimpses of whether Tim’s punch resistance is still intact. He’s been stopped in two out of his last three fights.
Although the 29-year-old American Velazquez is unbeaten, he has fought at the sub-evel against non-world-class opponents throughout his seven-year pro career.
Tszyu’s management found him somewhere. His unbeaten record supports the fight being shown on PPV in Australia. The match has received very little attention because the opponent isn’t well-known.
Tszyu is coming into Wednesday’s fight off the back of a seventh-round stoppage in his rematch with WBC 154-lb champion Sebastian Fundora last July. His performance in that fight was a massive drop off from his first contest against ‘The Towering Inferno’ Fundora last year.
The shots that Tim had been able to take from Fundora in their first fight bothered him in the rematch. Tszyu was down in round one and was slowly beaten down by Fundora until the fight was halted in the seventh.
Tim hasn’t looked like the same fighter since being stopped in the third round by IBF champion Bakhram Murtazaliev last year. That fight took something out of Tszyu. He was knocked down four times in that contest.
Tszyu, 31, replaced his longtime coach, Igor Goloubev, with the well-known Cuban trainer Pedro Diaz in hopes of revamping his game. The obvious way for Tszyu to rebuild would be to box more and be more selective in the exchanges he chooses to take with his opponents.
Wednesday’s Tszyu vs. Velazquez event will be on December 17th at the TikTok Entertainment Centre in Sydney, Australia.
